Amid a national movement to root out sexual harassment in the workplace, the Martin Agency’s situation highlights the potential backlash that can await companies that try to remove alleged harassers without giving an accounting of their alleged misconduct. Such abrupt exits can leave employees feeling their employers have failed to police wrongdoing.
.. Advertising has long had a reputation as an industry where sexual harassment is rampant.
.. Still, the Martin Agency controversy has created shock waves—in part because the firm, known for crafting slogans like “Virginia is for Lovers” and characters like the Geico Gecko, was widely understood to be a collegial place to work with a family-like culture.
“If it can happen at the Martin agency, then Lord knows, it happens everywhere else,”
The one best idea for ending sexual harassment
Today, more than 60 million Americans have arbitration clauses in their employment contracts, eliminating their Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial. Arbitration clauses can be required as a condition of employment — and they’re a harasser’s best friend. Forced arbitration keeps proceedings secret and allows predators to stay in their jobs, even as victims are pushed out or fired. Forced arbitration also silences other victims, who might have stepped forward if they’d known.
These clauses are unjust and un-American, and the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Harassment Act restores victims’ right to a jury trial. Under the act, victims can choose arbitration or court. This is the only way to ensure claims can be made public.
.. Congress should apply the same standards for sexual misconduct that it does to violations of securities law.
.. After the Enron and WorldCom frauds devastated the retirement funds of numerous investors, Congress responded with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which has helped restore investor confidence through better corporate governance, stricter reporting and enhanced whistleblower protections for employees who report fraud. The law also requires corporate officers to sign certifications, under penalty of perjury, attesting to their companies’ compliance with securities laws and maintenance of internal controls that work to identify violations.
.. Legislators, too, should have to attest annually to their offices’ compliance with sexual harassment laws and to disclose sexual harassment settlements (while shielding the identities of the victims). Changes like these could have uncovered the sexual harassment scandals at 21st Century Fox, which employed Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly, or the congressional practice of paying out confidential settlements with public money, much more quickly.
.. IN THE FIREHOUSE: Recognize the message sent by vulgar language
In our agency, you have to lead by example. Discipline is important. When those in positions of authority are crude in conversation, it fosters an environment that makes it easy for misconduct to happen. Vulgarity in language, even if inappropriate touching never happens, trickles down throughout the organization. If people in a position to lead and make decisions constantly curse and joke about sex while playing down complaints about harassment, it sends the message that harassment is not a problem — and that everyone else should feel the same way.
.. There are state and federal laws covering various forms of harassment and workplace safety. But without an enforceable mechanism that protects workers from retaliation for reporting dangerous workplace conditions, as in a union contract, those laws are repeatedly violated.
Nurses can be targeted not just by direct supervisors but also by doctors who are viewed as rainmakers by their hospital employers, who increasingly put their bottom lines ahead of the well-being of nurses and other staff. Management will commonly close ranks with the harasser — not with the target of the abuse.
Nurses who object to sexual misconduct can endure retribution, such as being reassigned to less desirable schedules or to clinical areas in which they have less expertise.
The G.O.P. Is Rotting
A lot of good, honorable Republicans used to believe there was a safe middle ground. You didn’t have to tie yourself hip to hip with Donald Trump, but you didn’t have to go all the way to the other extreme and commit political suicide like the dissident Jeff Flake, either. You could sort of float along in the middle, and keep your head down until this whole Trump thing passed.
Now it’s clear that middle ground doesn’t exist. That’s because Donald Trump never stops asking. First, he asked the party to swallow the idea of a narcissistic sexual harasser and a routine liar as its party leader. Then he asked the party to accept his comprehensive ignorance and his politics of racial division. Now he asks the party to give up its reputation for fiscal conservatism. At the same time he asks the party to become the party of Roy Moore, the party of bigotry, alleged sexual harassment and child assault.
There is no end to what Trump will ask of his party. He is defined by shamelessness, and so there is no bottom. And apparently there is no end to what regular Republicans are willing to give him. Trump may soon ask them to accept his firing of Robert Mueller, and yes, after some sighing, they will accept that, too.
.. Compare the tax cuts of the supply-side era with the tax cuts of today. There were three big cuts in the earlier era: the 1978 capital gains tax cut, the Kemp-Roth tax cut of 1981, and the 1986 tax reform. They were passed with bipartisan support, after a lengthy legislative process. All of them responded to the dominant problem of the moment, which was the stagflation and economic sclerosis. All rested on a body of serious intellectual work.
Liberals now associate supply-side economics with the Laffer Curve, but that was peripheral. Supply-side was based on Say’s Law, that supply creates its own demand. It was based on the idea that if you rearrange incentives for small entrepreneurs you are more likely to get start-ups and more innovation. Those cuts were embraced by Nobel Prize winners and represented an entire social vision, favoring the dispersed entrepreneurs over the concentrated corporate fat cats.
.. Today’s tax cuts have no bipartisan support. They have no intellectual grounding, no body of supporting evidence. They do not respond to the central crisis of our time.
.. The rot afflicting the G.O.P. is comprehensive — moral, intellectual, political and reputational.
Six Women Jointly Sue Harvey Weinstein Over Alleged Assaults
Lawsuit seeks class-action status, claims widespread coverup amounted to civil racketeering
Six women filed a lawsuit against Harvey Weinstein on Wednesday, claiming the movie producer’s actions to cover up sexual assaults amounted to civil racketeering.
The lawsuit was filed in a federal court in New York, seeking to represent what it describes as “dozens, if not hundreds,” of women who say they were assaulted by Mr. Weinstein.
The lawsuit claims that a coalition of companies and people became part of the growing “Weinstein sexual enterprise” and that they worked with him to conceal his widespread sexual harassment and assaults.