Workplace Harassment
How to know if you are facing workplace harassment?
Harassment is understood as unwelcomed behaviors, practices, and policies that target someone based upon their race, color, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity, sex (including pregnancy and maternity status), nationality, age, the possibility of them being affected by any physical or mental disability or genetic information.
Despite the constant creation of awareness and prevention measures against harassment in the workplace, the volume of harassment complaints remains unfortunately steady. Within the workplace context, harassment becomes unlawful in situations where the expectation of enduring the offensive conduct becomes a condition of continued employment or when the conduct is severe or pervasive enough to create an environment that a reasonable person would consider intimidating, hostile, or abusive.
What forms of harassment can the law protect you from?
To qualify as harassment, the offensive behaviors need to be severe, pervasive, or both. The behaviors themselves, however, can be anything from offensive jokes cracked in the office, to lewd pictures taped to someone’s desk, to mockery and put-downs in public, to threats of physical assault—or plain old interfering with a person’s ability to do his or her job undisturbed. Most of the common claims for workplace harassment cover one or several of the following:
- Abuse of Power of any kind
- Psychological Harassment or threats of any kind
- Targeted refusal to grant you full employment rights
- Bullying, either online or in-person
- Retaliation for seeking solutions to the suffered harassment
We know how intimidating facing any form of harassment can be, and we are here to protect you from the threats of those acting against your integrity.
Sexual harassment in the workplace often involves unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature. Note that sexual harassment doesn’t necessarily have to be of a sexual nature – for example, it can involve offensive or derogatory remarks about women (or men) in general, sexual orientation, or gender identity; dirty jokes about a person’s physical attributes; teasing or exclusion because of a person’s sexual orientation, etc.
A common form of sexual harassment is known as “Quid Pro Quo” (Latin for “this for that”) sexual harassment, which often involves a person in a position of power (a boss or a supervisor) explicitly or implicitly offering an employment opportunity — or threatening to take it away — in return for that employee’s satisfaction of a sexual demand. In other words, the stereotypical “sleep with me or you’re fired” scenario.
Hostile work environment harassment often includes misconduct such as inappropriate touching, persistent leering, telling dirty jokes, sending inappropriate text messages or unwanted sexual photos. When such conduct is severe and frequent enough, grounds for a hostile work environment lawsuit exist.