Allegations of Sexual Harassment and Discrimination by Loretta Lee
Sexual harassment is a common affair faced by working women in any organization irrespective of whether it is big or small (Crain and Matheny 2018). It was reported by The Australian Human Rights Commission that out of five at least one women experiences sexual harassment at some point of time in the workplace (Human rights commission 2018). Many industries faces legal suits because of women raising their voices against male-dominated workforces- sexual abuse and pay discrimination being the two important factors of such breakout of outrage of women. The tech sector already subjected to a squall of lawsuits, and Google in particular is found to be accused repeatedly of such sexual harassments at workplace (Hlavka 2014). In the following paragraphs it is discussed that besides being suited for the lower pay case related to pay discrimination on equal work, how a new suit alleged Google of having an unhealthy presence of bro-culture involved in sexual harassments, even physical violence against a female engineer Loretta Lee which affected her career. The ethical issues that came up and how it was dealt or was necessary to be dealt are also discussed below.
California courts have given permission to female Google employees to proceed with two major lawsuits with charges of sexual harassment and pay inequality, which in the opinion of attorneys related to civil rights has the capability of uncovering discrimination in a wide scale (Hill, Madden and Ezpeleta 2016). A judge belonging to San Francisco has given approval to a class-action complaint alleging that Google will have to respond in publicly manner claiming that many women employees have not been given proper compensation (Schultz 2018). Besides this, another big allegation came is of sexual harassment of a former female engineer.
Loretta Lee, the victimized female engineer served Google from year 2008 until she was terminated on February, 2016. Loretta claimed in the superior country court, Santa Clara that the company did not take prompt action after she reported of being sexually harassed and a pray of nasty gender discrimination. She also accused Google of wrongful termination. This separate case is centered on allegation that a bro-culture caused daily sexual harassment of the female software engineer .It is also now moving ahead as a class action, which is likely to put Google under pressure for addressing allegations that are related to sexual misconduct or harassment allegations in open court and disallowing private arbitration (Carr 2018). In words of Loretta Lee, she opined of being subjected to constant licentious comments, physical violence along with escapades. Loretta also claimed that her drinks were also surreptitiously contaminated with alcohol or any drug.
Arbitration Issues
In one occasion in a holiday party she got slapped by her male co-worker while intoxicated. She received disturbing and humiliating messages from one of her co-worker who approached for a horizontal hug from Loretta and was also faced with nerf (a type of foam rubber used to make toys and sports equipment) gun shots. The utmost humiliation and physical violence she faced was an occasion that was highlighted in the lawsuit which reflected that a male co-worker was found hiding himself under Loretta’s desk. After being caught hiding, when he had a realization of being discovered he ostensibly shouted that Lee will never be able to know what that male co-worker was doing. Surprisingly, Lee was never acquainted with that co-worker nor she had any conversation with him before. As Loretta was continuously subjected to such harassments, this incident terrified her of the thought that he may have fixed or installed any camera or similar other recording devices beneath her desk. In the words of lawsuit, the incident that Loretta faced with the co-worker daunted her badly.
When the complaint was eventually made by Loretta Lee, she claimed that her co-workers counter attacked her by continuous refusal of her code approval. This retaliation ultimately resulted in a poor performance of Loretta Lee and caused termination of her employment in the year 2016.
A Google spokesperson, Ty Sheppard, presented a statement that they take prompt actions when violations are noticed. Even this action includes terminating an employee from the company. In his words, Google have in place strong policies for dealing with harassment in the workplace and each and every complaints are reviewed with utmost sincerity. In the words of Lee, company did not pay heed to her repeated reports regarding sexual harassment, physical violence, and discrimination. This puts a big question mark on the transparency of company’s corporate governance. The actions of co-workers of Loretta especially male co-workers were not being taken seriously and was not investigated properly. Even Loretta got terminated from her employment which also did not have any proper investigation of the reasons behind her poor performance, also portrays the willingly ignoring of her reports to protect the company image. Google made a point in a court filing that Loretta should resolve this case of sexual harassment and physical violence in private arbitration (Massoud 2014). This tactic however had to face counter action significantly because of the rise of #MeToo movement (Zarkov and Davis 2018).
Comparison with Uber Case
Arbitration clauses puts a barrier to suit any company in terms of law and present the case to the court (Estlund 2017). This arbitration prevents the sexual misconduct or harassment and gender discrimination victims, and are pressurized to agree to resolve the disputes behind the closed doors. Often settlement is also done agreements that are not acknowledged properly. The tacticsof arbitration is effective in silencing the victims and the serious offenders can avoid severe consequences through this (Resnik 2014).
Richard Hoyer, Loretta’s attorney, stated that the women victims usually have to bear a reduction of two-third in average recoveries when they unwillingly have to participate in arbitration usually conducted by white men of old age compared to what they receive if jury trials are conducted. Richard, attorney of Loretta again refiled her case in the form of a class action in a written complaint. Even the attorney of Google, Brian Lee Johnsrud defended on the fact that arbitration has been conducted for decades and there exists good and neutral arbitrators who have specific expertise to handle arbitration in cases of allegation of sexual harassment, physical violence and gender discrimination (Stone 2018). Thus it shows how arbitration was a major ethical issue on the part of Google and the statement of Google’s attorney put a question mark as whether Google was seeking a confidentiality agreement from the victim Loretta Lee.
The decision of arbitration by Google in settling the case of victimization of sexual harassment and physical violence filed by engineer Loretta Lee, in my point of view, is not well off. Instead of the company taking any legal and severe actions against the alleged employees who on a daily basis disturbed, harassed and discriminated Loretta tried to hide them. Such an instance of sexual harassment can be taken of the UBER case where Susan Fowler, an UBER engineer immediately after joining the company received a chain of messages from the manager regarding his open relationships indirectly meaning of indulging in a sexual relationship with the manager (Pateman 2016). Susan was very agitated regarding this behavior, so she took evidences of screenshots in her phone and approached HR who also did not come to the rescue of Susan. Reassigned to her job she found out that many women employees working out in UBER faced degraded performance results when they sued the male managers, again gender discrimination was creeping in here. She reflected this issue in a written report which reflected the sexist corporate culture, and immediately step was taken by UBER.
Based on the claim of sexual harassments and similar other imputations UBER fired almost 20 employees including executives of senior positions and also rebuked 40 more employees. A further step was taken by UBER by commissioning for investigation of its workplace and the practices in that workplace. Former attorney general of U.S. Covington who was in charge of investigation, was instructed to evaluate the workplace environment in relation to Susan’s report of harassments and discrimination, the company practices of dealing with this sort of disturbances are enough competent or not and what preventive measures can UBER take to reflect the diversified culture not only in its workplace practices but also in the real experience of its customers. The report presented by Covington on June 13, 2017 lead to resignation of CEO Travis Kalanick along with the UBER founder (Spott 2018).The report also contained certain for improving the workplace culture of UBER, promoting fairness to prevent repetition of past mistakes. The main goal was to again incorporate trust within UBER employees as well as customers. In my opinion Google should have fired the accused employees and must have initiated an investigation like UBER to study its workplace practices and environment and take precautionary measures (Holland and Cortina 2016).
Justice, the seventh most important pillar of philosophy which can support my ethical decision making process of firing the alleged employees. Justice can be defined as possessing the qualities of worthiness, having a sense of right or wrong, sense of moral rightness, fair-mindedness. Justice is mainly centered on deontological philosophies. The basic opinion is that justice acts in for of what the employees or individuals working in any organization feels as their rights and performance in the organization. The distributive branch of justice says that if two employees are putting same effort in working, and one gets more payment that is salary is discriminated then here lacks distributive justice. Google already has an allegation of pay discrimination based on gender which showcases violation of distributive justice. Similarly, the procedural branch opines the prompt actions that brings a prompt conclusion, which was absent on part of Google when the sexual harassment report of employee Loretta Lee, was not addressed properly with a proper action of firing alleged employees instead of arbitration.
Thus it can be concluded that when cases of sexual harassments, physical violence, and pay discrimination based on gender related to women employees are reported in any organization must be dealt with prompt actions against those alleged employees (Schultz 2018). Proper investigation of the situations based on the reports of the victimized women employee, the work place practice and proper recommendations for improving the diversified culture in workplace to regain the trust of the employees is a good example of the prompt actions taken by UBER. If Google would have adapted similar type of strategy, instead of trying to settle the matter by private arbitration with the victim female engineer Loretta Lee, it would have been beneficial for both the women employees as well as for the business rapport by regaining trust of the employees.
References
Carr, F. 2018. https://fortune.com. [online] Fortune. Available at: https://fortune.com/2018/03/01/google-sexual-harassment-lawsuit-bro-culture [Accessed 27 Sep. 2018].
Crain, M.G. and Matheny, K., 2018. Sexual Harassment and Solidarity.
Estlund, C., 2017. The Black Hole of Mandatory Arbitration. NCL Rev., 96, p.679.
Hill, C., Madden, C. and Ezpeleta, M., 2016. Gender and the Extractive Industries: Putting Gender on the Corporate Agenda. Oxfam Australia.
Hlavka, H.R., 2014. Normalizing sexual violence: Young women account for harassment and abuse. Gender & Society, 28(3), pp.337-358.
Holland, K.J. and Cortina, L.M., 2016. Sexual harassment: Undermining the wellbeing of working women. In Handbook on well-being of working women (pp. 83-101). Springer, Dordrecht.
Humanrightscommission.vic.gov.au. (2018). Sexual harassment in the workplace. online Available at: https://www.humanrightscommission.vic.gov.au/the-workplace/sexual-harassment-at-work Accessed 19 Sep. 2018.
Massoud, M.F., 2014. International arbitration and judicial politics in authoritarian states. Law & Social Inquiry, 39(1), pp.1-30.
Resnik, J., 2014. Diffusing Disputes: The Public in the Private of Arbitration, the Private in Courts, and the Erasure of Rights. Yale LJ, 124, p.2804.
Schultz, V., 2018. Open Statement on Sexual Harassment from Employment Discrimination Law Scholars. Stan. L. Rev. Online, 71, p.17.
Schultz, V., 2018. Reconceptualizing Sexual Harassment, Again.
Spott, P., 2018. UBER: A Case Study in Strategy, Leadership and Change (Doctoral dissertation, The College of St. Scholastica).
Stone, K.L., 2018. Substantiated Answers to Important Questions About Sexual Harassment. Jotwell: J. Things We Like, p.1.
Zarkov, D. and Davis, K., 2018. Ambiguities and dilemmas around# MeToo:# ForHow Long and# WhereTo?
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