WHEN SPEAKING UP ISN’T ENOUGH
Comcast sex harassment cases exemplify the limits of #MeToo
NEW YORK The #MeToo movement is based on a basic premise: Speak up. For a lot of women, that’s gotten results. Many of the alleged perpetrators have been fired or exiled. Harvey Weinstein is facing criminal prosecution.
But as a trio of former Comcast workers are finding, speaking up has its limits. Two months ago, Rylinda Rhodes, Laterrica Perry and Jennifer McHenry handdelivered a petition with thousands of signatures to Comcast’s Philadelphia headquarters, alleging widespread harassment and demanding reforms to corporate policies that they say don’t do enough to protect women.
The cable giant has yet to adopt the recommendations of the petition. Like any big company, Comcast already has a sexual harassment policy. “Any allegation of harassment is taken very seriously and investigated thoroughly,” Jenni Moyer, a company spokeswoman, told Bloomberg News.
As sexual harassment has become national news, stories commonly turn on allegations against one powerful bad actor. What allegedly happened at Comcast may be more representative. When market research firm GfK conducted a nationwide survey in January, almost 40 per cent of women said they’d been sexually harassed at work. They also reported that verbal harassment is most common.
In one of the alleged incidents at Comcast, the accused harasser was fired. But so were some of the accusers, who claim they experienced retaliation and corporate foot-dragging. Taken together, the events raise an important question about the #MeToo movement: Can it be more than a firing squad?
While working at one of Comcast’s call centres, Rhodes said, she was subject to what she calls lockerroom behaviour: lewd comments, unwelcome advances, groping. She reported the worst offender to human resources, and the company investigated her claim.
“The employee adamantly denied the allegations,” Moyer said. “We took appropriate action at the time given his denial, and there haven’t been any complaints about him in the six years since that time.”
The response led Rhodes to believe the company’s policies were insufficient to protect workers like herself. She left the company in 2012, and last year, inspired by the growing national awareness of sexual harassment, she created a petition asking Comcast to commission an independent review and to put a human resources representative at all call centres and other work sites.
Comcast said it has a process, and it worked as designed. The company currently offers an anonymous hotline and online portal for employees who want to report harassment, Moyer said. Like many companies, it also requires all workers to have sexual harassment training.
Retooling corporate policy isn’t as flashy as ousting a high-profile executive. It can be expensive, and the results are hard to measure.
Rhodes, Perry and McHenry didn’t have union representation. Rhodes posted her petition on the site Coworker.org, which encourages employees to “launch, join and win campaigns to improve their jobs and workplaces.” After that, she said, Perry, McHenry and other employees reached out with their own stories.
Perry, who sold Comcast services door-to-door in Memphis starting in 2016, said she reported harassment to the company’s human resources department. In 2017, a male colleague agreed to write her a letter of recommendation but let her know “there would be strings attached,” she said. He began to ask her out, told her he dreamed about her and asked for her lingerie size, shesaid.
After rejecting his advances, Perry said she was reassigned to a less lucrative territory and denied sick time and new positions. She reported the incident, and three months later, the man was fired. But it took too long, she said.
“He went around saying I was this horrible person trying to get him,” she said. “They let him stay long enough to ruin my reputation.”
Rhodes, Perry and McHenry, whose stories were previously reported by the women’s website Jezebel, were all fired from Comcast. Rhodes filed a lawsuit against Comcast. Perry filed a complaint at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The company says Rhodes and Perry were fired for unrelated reasons and didn’t elaborate, because the cases are in litigation. It declined to comment on McHenry’s dismissal, saying the firm doesn’t comment on personnel matters.
Moyer said the company can’t comment on the settlement negotiations because litigation is pending. Comcast is still considering the demands of the petition.