Corporate culture catches up with #MeToo as local firms warned on discrimination
The #MeToo movement has reached corporate South Africa — and not a moment too soon, say some experts. This week one of the continent’s largest legal firms, ENSafrica, hosted a seminar on local law related to sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace.
Pareen Rogers, an executive in employment law at ENSafrica, said: “The risk for employers has increased significantly when dealing with sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace. And our courts have recognised that for too long these issues have been swept under the carpet and have not been dealt with appropriately by employers.”
She said the purpose of the seminar was to take their clients through the most recent developments in South African law and to encourage “debate and discussion”.
The firm cited cases of racial discrimination, sexual harassment and unfair dismissal — including the recent ruling that the dignity of former Imperial Holdings employee Adila Chowan was impaired after former CEO Mark Lamberti referred to her as “an employment equity candidate”.
Cited in the seminar was case law, including sexual harassment at Rustenburg Platinum Mines and Liberty Holdings where the victims were awarded damages.
This week, Paul Badrick, Johannesburg CEO of accounting firm Grant Thornton, stepped down while an investigation is conducted into sexual harassment claims against him.
A former director at the company, Nerisha Singh, blew the lid on what she called rampant harassment in the high echelons. Singh began legal action on a separate matter, after her employment contract was retracted following a sexual harassment complaint she laid against the company’s head of forensics.
Singh has been unemployed after complaining about her boss, who allegedly tried to give her platinum jewellery and made untoward advances to her. She made reference to another colleague who was lured into sharing a hotel room with the man, who later exposed himself to her.
Singh claims the company then scuppered another role she was offered by a prospective employer in the last month.
Rogers said the Employment Equity Act applied to both employees and prospective employees.
Singh’s representative, Natasha Moni, said: “To a seasoned labour lawyer, the increased risk of discrimination stems from human resource departments, who are for the most part complicit or bullied into submission themselves, and management who have little emotional intelligence and who continue to sweep matters under the carpet when they are raised.
“When a complaint of harassment or sexual harassment is brought to one’s attention one must take it out to externally experienced people such as an attorney and a psychologist. Keeping things in-house means that you sometimes will not get your issue dealt with with the experience and expertise it deserves,” she said.
“Singh lost out on equity partnership and due to secondary victimisation is finding it extremely difficult to find another job. This is unfair. She walks around with the stigma and although she is a very well-educated black female, she cannot celebrate the pinnacle of her career, like she should, because of the way her employer handled her complaint. This is unfair.”
Rogers said the courts were not going easy on perpetrators.
“The prevalence of the issues of sexual harassment and discrimination, particularly based on race and gender, within our society has resulted in a number of illuminating and significant judgements from the Labour Court, the High Court, the Labour Appeal Court and the Constitutional Court,” she said.
One judge asked if a company, which claimed in court that a victim did not protest sufficiently that her senior was harassing her, expected the victim to shout from the highest mine dump in order to be heard.
A Constitutional Court judgment cited Nelson Mandela regarding the historical context in South Africa when considering race matters.
Rogers said it is evidence that “all of these courts have recognised the inherent prejudice present in our society and particularly our workplaces where patriarchy and systematic discrimination must be eradicated”.
Social media campaigns like the #MeToo campaign had “given a voice to victims of sexual harassment and discrimination internationally”, she said.
“Our courts too have heeded the call by victims of sexual harassment and unfair discrimination and have imposed liabilities on employers who simply choose to turn a blind eye to such heinous offences in the workplace.”