Mistle-NO! A damper on work parties
THE RECENT barrage of sex harassment allegations has swept away high-profile men in the media, the film and entertainment industries and on Capitol Hill in a breathtaking tsunami of comeuppance — but it’s still a major problem in the construction industry.
Ashley Foster, 27, who’s worked in construction for five years, describes a toxic work environment at several Manhattan job sites, where she says women workers were routinely harassed by male supervisors and peers.
Foster’s tormentors included one male supervisor who repeatedly exposed his genitals to her, and two who showed her cell phone photos of their penises.
When she complained to the owners of her nonunion company, Trade Off Construction Services, she says they promised an investigation. Months later, the men are still on job sites and there’s no evidence that an investigation ever began.
“They think there’s nothing wrong with it,” Foster said of the Long Island-based company. “I wasn’t happy with how they handled it because still to this day I don’t see any change, I don’t see any investigation, I don’t hear that they looked into anything.”
On Monday, the law firm of Giskan Solotaroff & Anderson filed a complaint on behalf of Foster and another Trade Off worker, Tierra Williams, 28, with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the state Division of Human Rights. “We hope and expect the EEOC will investigate and take action,” said attorney Jason Solotaroff.
Foster started work for Trade Off in 2013, working as a laborer at job sites around Manhattan, including 1 Wall St. At that site, she says, a supervisor showed her a photo of his penis on his cell phone.
On job sites male workers would “consistently . . . comment on our appearance, suggest that we should not be working but rather staying at home cooking or having babies, and/or sexually proposition us,” she stated in an affidavit filed with her complaint to the EEOC.
In March, Foster started work at 55 Hudson Yards, a 780-foot tower built just outside the site by Related, the developer of the megaproject underway over the rail yards near the Javits Center.
Foster says Related required all new workers at the site to attend a three-hour presentation that outlined numerous requirements to ensure job site safety.
That presentation, she noted, made no mention of a sex harassment policy or a protocol to file a complaint.
A spokeswoman for Related declined to comment.
A few weeks into the job, she entered a work shanty and found a male Trade Off foreman named Troy kissing a female laborer. She quickly left without saying anything.
In June, she says, she walked into that same shanty — and as she did, Troy exposed his genitals to her. “He didn’t say anything,” Foster said. “I was like, I don’t want any of this, and I left.”
In August, Foster learned her sister was in need of immediate medical help and texted Troy, saying she needed to leave for an emergency. He told her to meet him in a worker shanty on the 18th floor of the project. When she arrived, she says Troy again exposed himself to her.
Days later, Foster missed a day of work without calling in and Troy told her she was fired. She says she complained to Jason Abadie, a Trade Off vice president, about Troy flashing and harassing her, and Abadie said he would investigate.
She says Abadie reassigned her to another work site on the Upper West Side, where she says she has not experienced the same level of workplace hostility.
Williamssays she too was repeatedly harassed, including by a co-worker who’d stare at her whenever she entered or exited the bathroom.
She says she asked him to stop — and he shot back, “B---h, I do what the f--k I want to do.”
A spokesman for Trade Off, Brian Krapf, said the firm is looking into the allegations. “Trade Off has a zero-tolerance policy and takes any charge of sexual harassment very seriously,” Krapf said. THE HOLIDAY office party in a post-Harvey Weinstein world is likely to look a lot tamer — if there’s a get-together at all.
Mistletoe is out, spiking the punch is verboten and creating a safe space for workers is job one as 2017’s flood of sexual harassment charges reverberates in board rooms and HR departments.
“We are seeing more companies take the extreme action of canceling their parties altogether,” Andrew Challenger, vice president of the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, told the Daily News.
The numbers in his company’s holiday party report back him up: 11% of businesses will not host a soiree this year after holding one in the past, a huge jump from just 4% in 2016.
Of the companies still planning to celebrate with their employees, only 48% will serve alcohol — down from 62% in 2016.
Blame it all on the what Challenger calls the “Weinstein Effect.”
The allegations of rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment against disgraced movie mogul Weinstein and an array of other prominent men proved a holiday party game-changer.
The open bar, once a party staple, is now a vestige of Christmas past at places like Vox — the general interest news site where editorial director Lockhart Steele was fired after an October harassment complaint.
A leaked party memo states the company will “ramp up the food and cut down on the drinks.” And instead of free booze all night, “each attendee will receive two drink tickets with which they can get alcoholic drinks if they choose.” Once the tickets are gone, only non-alcoholic drinks will be served.
“Alcohol is like a courageous drug, but it can really operate against you because you can do or say inappropriate things,” warned Dr. Sandra Haber, a New Yorkbased psychologist who said the new approach was smart.
Liquor is not the only thing disappearing from the party circuit. The National Federation of Independent Business, in its 2017 party guidelines, called for a farewell to mistletoe.
Dallas-based outsourcing attorney Kelly Culhane said canceling the parties creates the possibility of co-workers blaming the victims of harassment.
“When you do (cancel), you run the risk of creating backlash against the very class of people who were subject to harassment,” she told The News.