Critics say #MeToo turns blind eye to diversity
Women of color, poor workers feel left out
Kim Lawson had been working the register, taking orders and bagging burgers at McDonald’s for two years when she says the sexual harassment began.
It was 2017. There were two men – a shift manager who uttered lewd comments and a co-worker who made sexual overtures and touched Lawson inappropriately.
In May, Lawson became one of 10 McDonald’s employees to file a harassment complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. And while she says the #MeToo movement “affected me greatly,” that was not the spark that turned the 25year-old mother based in Kansas City, Missouri, into an activist.
“The fact that I was angry, that’s what made me file,” says Lawson, who helped organize a national one-day strike by McDonald’s workers last month to call out workplace harassment. “It happens to more than just wealthy people, and it’s going to continue to happen as long as no one does anything about it.’’
It has been a year since #MeToo burst into the national consciousness, bringing to light the pervasiveness of sexual harassment in work sites across the country. But some critics say women of color and those in lower-wage jobs have been largely left out of the conversation. Though the #MeToo hashtag was created by a black woman more than a decade ago, the faces of the cause have often been white and affluent, and the industries receiving the most media scrutiny have been the rarefied worlds of Hollywood and TV journalism.
And yet it is black women in particular and female employees of restaurants, factories and other blue-collar workplaces who bear the brunt of sexual harassment and abuse.
“The MeToo movement ... can’t just be for women who have a Twitter account,” says California Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, who has introduced legislation to address the needs of blue-collar workers. “My concern is that if we don’t tackle the issues lowwage women workers face ... they’re going to continue to be left behind.”
Whole story isn’t being told
It was Hollywood that catapulted the #MeToo movement into the headlines when dozens of actresses accused producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment and even rape – charges he has denied.
As an array of once seemingly untouchable celebrities such as Kevin Spacey and Louis C.K. were called out by accusers, members of the Hollywood community banded together to form Time’s Up, an organization dedicated to fighting such abuses as well as broader inequities in the workplace.
“There was a very clear call to action by women of the entertainment industry,” says Monica Ramirez, co-founder of Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, a national farmworkers alliance. “They made the decision that to solve the problem, we needed to link arms across industries.”
It is the media’s focus, many contend, that has been one-sided.
“So much of the power of the #MeToo movement comes from ... the public outing” of high-profile harassers and equally wellknown accusers, Gonzalez says. But there’s less interest “when you have workers that, quite frankly, people don’t care as much about. And you have employers that nobody’s heard of, or supervisors and companies that nobody’s heard of. It just doesn’t have the same … appeal for the broader media.’’
But just as it was a black woman, Tarana Burke, who launched the #MeToo hashtag and movement to much less fanfare more than a decade ago, it is black women who are among those most in need of any gains.
“There has not been enough attention to the way sexual and racial harassment intersect and the ways a woman’s racial identity can target them,” says Emily Martin, vice president for education and workplace justice at the Na- tional Women’s Law Center.
An analysis by the law center of complaints filed from 2012 to 2016 with the EEOC found that black women working in the private sector lodged sexual harassment charges at nearly three times the rate of white women. And a study by the workplace culture and compensation monitoring site Comparably similarly found that African Americans had the highest rate of being sexually harassed, with 24 percent saying they experienced such mistreatment on the job.
Like Burke, advocates for women of color and those working on farms, in hotels and in other working-class jobs say they have been sounding the alarm on sexual harassment. Still, #MeToo has presented an chance to more quickly usher in change.
“We often say with pride that our janitors said basta (enough) before anyone said ‘ me too,’ ’’ says Gonzalez, who introduced a bill two years ago addressing abuse in the janitorial industry.
The National Women’s Law Center found in its EEOC analysis that among complaints in which an industry was noted, the largest share – roughly 14 per- cent – was made by women working in food services and the hospitality sector.
When several McDonald’s employees filed complaints with the EEOC in May, their actions spurred the creation of women’s committees within the Fight for $15 movement focused on raising the minimum wage. Committee members then put in motion a strike that led McDonald’s crew members in 10 cities to walk out in protest of what they said was the company’s inaction in dealing with harassment, ranging from groping to requests for sex, in its restaurants.
If “your paycheck is the only thing standing between your family and homelessness next week, it’s much easier (to be coerced by) someone sexually,” Martin says. “The McDonald’s strike ... is a great example of workers organizing, and most of the individuals that brought the EEOC claims against McDonald’s as part of that movement are women of color.”
‘I never got anywhere’
The hospitality industry also has taken steps to better protect workers. Though hotels in several cities, including Chicago, Seattle and New York, already make sure workers have access to personal alert devices to protect them from sexual assault and other crimes, several of the largest hotel chains committed last month to distributing those devices industrywide by 2020.
They are needed, says Juana Melara, who has spent years cleaning rooms in hotels. She has many stories. A common scenario is a guest asking for a massage, or staying in the room while the housekeeper cleans and starting a conversation that quickly crosses the line.
She stayed at that hotel for years before getting her current job in 2014. “I always reported. I wasn’t quiet at all, but I never got anywhere,” she says. And when she speaks to former co-workers, conditions at that hotel seem worse. “That’s why we fight so hard. ... They’re just trying to earn a living.”
Ultimately, much of the change is emerging from the grassroots.
“I never thought I would be in this position,” says Kim Lawson, whose sexual harassment complaint against McDonald’s has helped propel her to the forefront of the effort to battle it. “I’ve had a chance to make my voice heard and actually make a difference. ... I’m grateful for the opportunity. I’m grateful for this movement in general.’’
“There has not been enough attention to the way sexual and racial harassment intersect and the ways a woman’s racial identity can target them.” Emily Martin National Women’s Law Center