Playgrounds for sexual harassers
Scholars of public policy always look for unintended consequences. But at a certain point, once such a side effect is well known, does it become just part of the policy itself? We asked ourselves this question as we researched the changes in the city’s Parks Department from the 1970s until today.
From 2008-12, we interviewed 130 people working in parks — from workfare workers and participants in the six-month welfare-to-work Parks Opportunity Program, to top management in the department, and from longtime city workers to volunteers and staff for the many parks conservancies in the city.
One thing that came up quickly and repeatedly was the issue of sexual harassment. About one-fifth of our interviewees mentioned it. Everyone understood job training participants in the Parks Opportunity Program, or JTPs, to be the main targets of harassment.
JTPs are hired into six-month welfareto-work jobs that require four days of work and one day of training weekly. The department hires very few permanently, in part because it relies on a fresh crop of lowerpaid JTPs every few months.
In 2010, when we were doing our interviews, 74% of JTPs were women, and 90% were black or Latina. By contrast, the fulltime workforce was 68% male.
This bred a climate of harassment. One JTP told of a male supervisor rubbing up against her when “showing her how to use a broom.” Another was warned to avoid one of the “crew chiefs” who drive cleaning crews of JTPs from playground to playground, and told us she saw a mattress in a playground “park house” along his route.
Some stories were less direct, as when full-time workers would criticize their fellow workers in interviews for taking advantage of JTPs. And sometimes, in an all-toofamiliar trope, JTPs would suggest that other JTPs would offer themselves to supervisors in hopes of finding someone to support them financially or put them in for a permanent position.
It was pervasive — and predictable. When the department created a stratum of workers who were both overwhelmingly women and very poor, in precarious positions, it should have been obvious things would go wrong. A little background is necessary. After the job cuts during 1970s fiscal crisis, the Parks Department reorganized its workforce, moving from “fixed-post” workers — assigned to specific parks — to mobile cleaning crews, who could be taken in a van from park to park.
This, in turn, enabled an expansion of the workforce in the 1990s, not through permanent employment, but through workfare. Workfare requires work as a condition of receiving welfare payments, but is not legally defined as employment. It was one of Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s pet projects: More than 35,000 workfare workers were deployed throughout the city.
In 1997, legal advocates initiated a lawsuit on behalf of several workfare workers claiming that the city was responsible for protecting them against sexual and racial harassment. The city — in a suit continued under the Bloomberg administration — argued that because workfare wasn’t employment, equal employment opportunity law couldn’t apply. After seven years, the city lost the case narrowly in federal court.
The Parks Opportunity Program — which does treat JTPs as employees — began to supplant workfare in the early 2000s. Mayor de Blasio discontinued workfare a year ago, but has kept JTPs.
Problems persist. In 2013 — 16 years after the first harassment case against workfare — the Daily News broke a story about two parks supervisors on Randalls Island who asked JTPs to pole dance at a Christmas party in a park house there. There was no direct quid pro quo, but these same supervisors were responsible for, and able to reward or punish, the women.
We weren’t surprised. Yet before the story broke, when we asked top parks officials in charge of the Parks Opportunity Program about any problems with men and women working together, the program director played dumb.
It wasn’t until we reinterviewed parks officials in 2015, after the story broke, that we got an earful about the department’s new efforts to take harassment seriously. As claims about powerful men abusing their power — and women — come pouring out, it’s important to understand that it’s not just famous women, and it’s not just men with conventional measures of power. It’s about relative power in the workplace. Back to our original question: After at least 20 years of knowing that the restructured parks workplaces give men the power to harass and sexually exploit the women who work under them, at what point can we say that such behavior is, by default, part of the city’s labor policy?