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Saturday, July 04, 1998
Business responds to rulings
Companies scramble to update their harassment policies after two recent Supreme Court decisions.
By Maggie Jackson
Associated Press
Sandra Marsh couldn't quite decide whether to sign up her two small health care companies for the Harassment Hot Line offered by a local consultant.
Then the Supreme Court made up her mind.
In a landmark pair of decisions June 26, the high court opened companies to more sexual harassment suits by ruling that employers can be sued for harassment they didn't even know about.
"After looking at the Supreme Court rulings, I got there very quickly," said Marsh, chief executive officer of the Culver City, Calif. companies Pain Net and All Care. "Although we think we're proactive in many areas, just when we think we've met the measure, we find out we haven't."
Other business leaders are also taking a closer look at their defenses. They're rewriting company manuals and policy statements and asking outside lawyers to brief the board of directors or review harassment rules.
"I'm getting calls in large numbers saying, `let's review (our policy), let's tighten it up'," said Laurel Bellows, an employment lawyer and past chairwoman of the American Bar Association's Commission on Women. "For the most part, the concern is, `what is the extent of my liability?"'
While past court decisions focused on the liability of the harasser, last week's decisions said companies can be held responsible for harassment even if top executives didn't know about it. Even when no injury such as a demotion occurs, employers can be held responsible.
Companies can defend themselves if they exercise "reasonable care" to prevent and correct harassment, or if the employee "unreasonably" failed to use anti-harassment policies, the justices said.
"It makes it abundantly clear that employers can't rely on ignorance as a defense," said Jonathan Turley, professor of law at Georgetown University.
Yet companies can't simply slap down a policy and settle back, said Turley. "They will need to show that their procedures are more than paper tigers and that they represent serious efforts to detect and correct harassment."
IBM gives new managers harassment training and all managers periodic diversity training, and seeks to clearly communicate its "zero-tolerance" policy to all employees. As a result, the company isn't jumping to make changes in response to the rulings. "It's not that we won't do any evaluations, but we're pretty comfortable," said spokeswoman Kendra Collins.
But other companies are alarmed, said Frances Mary Maloney, a New York city-based employment lawyer.
Since the decisions, she has gotten more than six calls from the directors of multinational corporations asking for briefings on the rulings, and five calls from companies asking for reviews of their harassment policies.
A concerned Sandra Marsh signed up Monday for the Harassment Hot Line run by human resource consultants T.R. Anton Inc. The service, which costs $695 a year and up, investigates employee complaints and reports back to employers.
Marsh, whose 300 employees are spread across 12 states, is also planning to set up annual harassment training for new managers. Currently, new employees simply sign an anti-harassment policy during orientation.
Marsh said she had assumed her businesses were safe because employees were told harassment wouldn't be tolerated. "But zero-tolerance isn't enough, not in looking at what the court has come to."
Texas Instruments, meanwhile, has brought in its sexual harassment consultant to comb all company materials and update them to reflect the rulings. Especially, the Dallas-based company will emphasize the existence of its complaint procedure, said diversity manager Tegwin Pulley.
"We need to re-emphasize to everyone that if there's anything that's bothering anyone, they need to go talk to somebody and we need to address these issues," she said.
ICN Pharmaceuticals Inc. has a different reason to be ultra-cautious: the Costa Mesa, Calif., company's chairman and chief executive officer, Milan Panic, is being sued for sexual harassment. In the suit coming to trial July 13, former human resources director Mary Martinelli also charges that executives knew that Panic was harassing her but failed to act. The company, which also is a defendant, denies the allegations.
Last month, ICN completed its annual review of its sexual harassment policies, but Friday's rulings will prompt an immediate reassessment, said ICN general counsel David Watt.
"We try to review our policies on a regular basis," he sighs. "Unfortunately, it seems the Supreme Court has a ruling (on this issue) every day."
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