Recommendations announced to tackle sexual harassment at work
THE Harvey Weinstein affair and the resulting #MeToo twitter movement has shone a spotlight on sexual harassment in the workplace over the past year or so.
What has followed the furore is a steady stream of surveys outlining the true depths of the problem.
One recent UK survey suggested that 53% of women and 20% of men have experienced sexual harassment at work.
With this as a backdrop, the Government has set about looking at realistic ways of tackling the problem, and on July 25, the Parliamentary Committee tasked with looking at sexual harassment in UK workplaces reported back with its recommendations.
These recommendations, some of which may end up on the statue book, include the following:
1. A duty on employers to protect employees from sexual harassment in the workplace, in the hope that employers treat this new duty just as seriously as they take some of their other duties such as those relating to data protection and money laundering.
2. A duty on public sector employers to carry out risk assessments in relation to sexual harassment in their workplaces, just as they might do currently in relation to health and safety.
3. Introducing the concept of third party harassment, where employers end up being liable for their failure to take reasonable steps to prevent third parties from harassing their staff.
4. Extending the legal protection from sexual harassment to interns and volunteers.
5. Extending the time in which a victim of sexual harassment has to bring an Employment Tribunal claim against their employer from three months to six months.
6. Creating a presumption of loser pays legal costs, so that employers who lose sexual harassment claims in the Employment Tribunals always have to pay the employee’s legal costs.
7. Restricting the use of confidentiality clauses (often referred to as nondisclosure agreements or NDA’s) to certain Government-approved standard clauses to ensure that victims of sexual harassment at work are not prevented from speaking out even after they’ve signed an NDA.
■ Owen John is an employment lawyer at Cardiff law firm Darwin Gray LLP.