Of a sexual nature or of a sexist nature, you should be able to get your employer to stop it. In an ideal world you should really get your employer to stop it. Host we are talking about just the federal workplace the eeoc covers the private workplace as well. Guest yes. We were created to implement the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That was the major Civil Rights Act in this country saying to private employers, any employer with 15 or more employees, you may not discriminate waste on on race,based religion, national origin, sex, disability or age. This is any private employer with more than 15 employees is subject to this law. Has 53c has 50 feet offices around the country ready to help anyone who has experienced discrimination. You go to the website eeoc. Gov, there is an 800 number. We will do everything we can. Host how does a federal agency stop Sexual Harassment in the private work place . Guest the law is set to govern the private workplace and you can bring your employer to court and get the court to stop it or we can come in and try to settle it before. Lets be clear. The law can only do so much. We as a government Enforcement Agency can only do so much. We can do a lot millions of dollars we have gotten for women in cases but that is still the tip of the iceberg. There is something new that we are doing. We are trying to get out to employers and say we will work with you to stop this bad behavior from happening before it becomes illegal. Two weeks ago we rolled out a new type of training, respectful workplace is training for employees and supervisors to teach people how to be respectful in the workplace, to teach supervisors how to deal with the complaint. Most supervisors, if someone comes forward and says, john is sexually harassing me, john is asking me for a date and ive told him no and he keeps coming on to me, have training so that supervisor takes that complaint as a gift. Instead of saying i do not want to start my day with this complaint, instead to teach that supervisor to say thank you for coming forward and being brave enough to come forward and heres what im going to do to deal with that. Most supervisors are not going to know how to do that unless they are trained. In the new training we just rolled out is designed to treat that. Host our phone lines are lighting up. We have divided the lines by women and men great dial in on your lines. We want to know what you think. Dblum, the usael today has the headline the weinstein affect. sw many cases does the eeoc the related to Sexual Harassment each year and has the number gone up in recent weeks . Guest it takes a while for charges to come in so i cannot say whether charges have come up. I can tell you there is been a four fold increase in our web traffic on the issue of Sexual Harassment. People are looking for information. We get about 12,000 charges a harassment,based the reality is that most people do not ever even bring the legal charge. Most people stay silent. Peopleearch shows 15 of will openly file a legal charge. Our number is not at all the large number that is out there. A statistic that was sobering to with myi worked republican colleagues on a study of workplace harassment, that report is on our website as well, it turns out that about 70 of people who experienced harassment in the workplace never tell anybody in the workplace they tell their friends and family, but they never complain, not to their supervisor or hr. Most people stay silent and they are staying silent because they are afraid of what will happen to them if they come forward with their complaint. They know that complaint is not going to be treated as a gift, thank you for coming forward. We have to change that culture. Host do you think it is changing with the weinstein affect . This is an abc Washington Post poll that was just taken. A sharp increase in americans who say Sexual Harassment is a serious problem. In 2011, 40 7 said it was a serious problem. Now, 64 . Guest people of asked me whether i think this is a Tipping Point. I say we need two Tipping Points. The first Tipping Point is in naming the problem. Hashtag has been so important. Tipping point is speaking out. The second Tipping Point has to be change. Actual change that employers make in their workplaces so women and men 16 of our charges come from men so people feel safe and coming out. That is the second Tipping Point. I am hopeful we are getting there. The first Tipping Point will bring us to the second. It has to be sustained and it has to be because employers step action, reachegic out to the eeoc as well as other partners, to actually make a change. Host will have a conversation ere on the washington journal for the next few hours. She had the nail right on the head. That pushed me right out of the workplace because i was afraid the men would continue to do what they were doing to me. It got to the point where i was menafraid to even work with because i knew the kind of things they were doing and they were not getting in trouble for. It made it where even if i told, it would still see my fault because i was looking too pretty that day. Maybe i was walking a different way. I never could figure out why they always did that to me. It got me to a point where i was too afraid to even venture into an opportunity that involved a man. Host when was this happening, what years . Caller up until maybe last year . Last year was the last straw, his privateulled part out directly in front of me. It was so creepy that all i could do was grabbed my stuff and leave and i never went back because it creeped me out so bad. I am too old to keep going through this. It has been happening all through my 20s, 30s, 40s, here i am 50 years old, they are still doing it. I cannot take it anymore. Keep if ich to want to work, i have to deal with the creepiness of a man. Like, listen, you could find something with all women. That is a hard job to find. Youre never going to find that. Mostly men are in every position. A woman is not safe. It is not of the woman to say i do not trust this guy, he is making me uncomfortable. You do not do that. You bow out gracefully. Guest this is precisely the story we do not want to have our daughters and granddaughters having to deal with. We want to stop it now for everybody, whether youre 50, 40, 30, 20, or 15. The survey shows that most women do not report why not . Because of fear. The first fears they will not be believed, it will be trivialized, they will say what were you doing, lets talk about your part in this. Fear of being blamed. ,hen fear of nothing happening which is clearly what has happened in so many work places. Third, even if something does happen, you are lucky to be in a place with a stop the harassment, fear of retaliation, professional or social. How do we stop this fear, we have this story not happen . The employer, the person who is running that business has to realize that it is costly to the business cannot find out if harassment is happening and to stop it. The one cost that businesses often think about is if i get sued, i will have to spend money. That is true. Are in direct financial causes that are happening to businesses across this country every day. Those are the costs on Workplace Productivity and health of the target of the harassment, someone who is seeing the target and had been working at to this have feltd also uncomfortable. Job turnover people leave, if they can, economically. Businesseser level, are losing good people to their competitors at the level they are not as caring as much as their people, it still affects them if someone gets up and leaves and they have to hire someone else. There is a huge human, moral, and financial cost to employers not taking proactive steps to finding out what is going on and stopping it. We have to stop it. Morning. Hy, good caller thank you so much for having me on the show. Im very nervous to share my experience, but it has been helpful to hear other women talk about their experiences. I had extreme Sexual Harassment experience in 1996 when i worked for a large chemical company. Out on hisinvited me last day and said there were other people that were going to be there. There were not, it was just him and i. He proceeded to drug my drink in a restaurant and give me against my will for about a day and a half. I did not report it because i blocked it out for almost five years. Then i finally did work up the nerve to file a police report, did not get anywhere. At one point, i looked them up online and she had some kind of tracking software where he turned around and facebook friend in me out of sarcasm and a type of bullying. I wanted to share was that even though i did not get anywhere legally, it put me on a rocky road where it took a lot of effort on my part but i took my experience and turned it around and made myself strong and im now an environmentalist, im a political activist and i do the best i can every day to always improve and always learn and now i am sharing and it took toong time, but thank you you, your show, and everyone else who is sharing. Host thank you for calling in this morning. What about statutes of limitations . In the employment context, there is a shorter statute of limitations. Report, you can file and they should be able to do things even years later. Youn employment setting, have a little less than one year from the time the harassment happened to maintain your legal right. 300 days in most states. Within that amount of time you have to come to us. If for asthma and has been happening for a long time, the only thing that has to happen within 300 days is the last incident of harassment. That is what matters legally. Employers,ess, the they should want to know about something that happened five years ago. Not in terms of the legal liability, in terms of the economic smartness of trying to stop it. Surveys show that the impact on your workforces health and productivity is huge millions of dollars. Employers have to realize that even if they do not have a daily ship complaints, they need to remember that 70 of people are not even complaining. If they want to know what is going on in their workplace, they have to do an Anonymous Survey of their employees. They have to send out an send out a survey that says not have you experienced Sexual Harassment. They have to send a survey that and say or 12 behaviors have you experienced any of these behaviors . Academics have figured out these surveys. That would let an employer know what is happening and can you imagine the impact on a workforce if they get a survey anonymously, please fill out whether this has happened to you because the leadership of this Company Cares about making it not happen. The employer will get information and the employer will be sending a message enough. We are not going to tolerate this. Host a Washington Post abc poll asked this question about two women, if they have at her if they have ever received unwanted sexual advances from a man. Than half site unwanted sexual advances, including three in 10 from a coworker. When you investigate claims, do you talk to the harasser . Guest yes. When someone files a charge, one of the first things we do in many cases is offer free mediation for the employer to andent, the charging party, it could be that as the first time the employer knows about it and can deal with it through the mediation we offer. We will also investigate. Investigation means you call witnesses, you start with the employer, the supervisor, we will interview the alleged harasser, what we do is determine whether we think there is reasonable cause to believe discrimination happened. Were not making a final judgment, we are saying we think discrimination happened. If we say we think discrimination happened, we issue a finding of reasonable cause and then we have a more formal settlement procedure. In one year, we got 40 million in damages for people who had filed charges, just an informal settlement. Takeat settlement does not , if the employer does not settle, then the employees allowed to go to court and continue this in court. We at the eeoc can also bring cases in court. We have brought many cases. We do not have enough resources to do what congress has told us we have to do. Congress tells us what to do, does not always give us enough money to do it. We help as many people as we can. Often people come through our doors and go from us to court. Host we are talking with commissioner feldblum of the equal opportunity employment commission. Al in wisconsin, good morning. I think women are being subjected to way too much harassment in the workplace. Im intimately knowledgeable about the situation. And i affected my family am sorry to say this, the eeoc is a paper tiger because my other half was subjected to over 20 years of stuff like this and it is not being resolved. I am passionate about this. I sympathize with every poor woman that is calling and looking for help and assistance and god bless you, please help them. Please stop this. Please, gentlemen, wake up and act like gentlemen. Treat your other half for your fairer sex as an equal because we all deserve fairness that we should give, we should receive. I am sorry to say i do not like the song the beatles did years ago, woman is just a derogatory term. Men that feel that way are immature babies. Commissioner, when you talk to these alleged harassers, males, what do they tell you, why do they harass . Guest i am so glad that al noted why would not call the while i would not call the eeoc a paper tiger, we would be a stronger tiger with more money. Part of what we are trying to do help everywe cannot woman and man who comes to us, that is why we try to invest money up front so we can stop this from happening. That is why we rolled out this new training. To your question about what our people say what do people say . Often they just deny it. The investigation turns out that it is true and the action is taken against them. Sometimes they do not feel like what they did was wrong. This goes back to training. One of the things we say about training is it is not designed to change your mind, it is designed for you to keep your job. What i mean is, in a two our training, we are not going to convince some guys that it is bad to say to someone every day that you look sexy. They my life look say my wife loves it when i say that. You can believe whatever you want, that when you walk into this workplace, these are the rules. To not focus on changing beliefs, you focus on changing behavior. It is clear to any man in a workplace, here are the behaviors that are not ok. Any policy, any procedure, none of it will work unless there is accountability. That if theyo see act in ways they have been told not to act, there will be consequences. If the guy who had pulled out is the next day was fired, i think that might have affected other people down the line. Cases, just hypothetical i cannot comment on any particular case, but there has to be accountability. Host lets hear from mary and rockville, maryland. Caller i am having a bad ptsd attack right now trade i have suffered nightmarish harassment my entire life because i grew up horrifically disfigured by my antiabortion mother. I have had horrendous experiences in the workplace, two i wanted to mention. Clarence thomas deny me equal pay at the eeoc because he was disgusted by the scars on my faith. He told that to a male colleague after he kicked me out of his office. I had a clear cut open and shut unequal pay case but he would not take it because he cannot stand my looks. Warn all the people of the washington, d. C. Area about horrific illegal discrimination and harassment that goes on at timesshington newspaper. Body shamedically by several people there, men and women because i am disfigured. Even though i was doing a great job and i saved the paper many times from embarrassing mistakes int wouldve gone to press the Production Department and in the legal advertising department. In the legal advertising department, they kept protecting this bill cosby type person who thought he was entitled to have sex with all the attractive women who worked there and he was nasty to women like me who did not meet his standards. Even there he told me i was not attractive, he demanded sex in front of other people and i refused and he demanded money. He said i owed him money for putting up with my ugly face. I had a lot of witnesses, i was openly insulted by our trumplike boss. I complained to hr and the hr director admitted she was trying to get me fired and indicated it was because she was disgusted with my looks. Guns. Een threatened with complained about the company, they were fired. He was around he was allowed to drink on the job, allowed to look at pornography on his computer. Our bossnly openly bragged about his own adultery. He said he was going to hire the next person based on her youth and beauty. He never stopped any of the male colleagues from insulting me. Because igally fired informed another female coworker whose work was about to double because i was being suspended to cover up for the drinking on the job by the company cosby. Host let me ask the commissioner, these are allegations. Buys to thisnd collar, to others who might be a similar work place what do andadvise to this collar others who might be in a similar workplace . Guest harassment happens on all basis is, not just on sex. This problem of the superstar harasser. That is the person who the Company Values highly, who brings in a lot of money and sales and they make the wrong costbenefit analysis they decide we have these complaints against this guy, but it is cheaper for a off the people who are complaining and to keep him instead. That is wrong. The Research Shows that the apact, the negative impact on business of keeping a toxic worker of that kind is way greater than getting rid of that person and cleaning up the workplace. What advice can you give . Doiously, one can and should what this person and other women have done which is talk to hr, talk to other supervisors. None of that is going to help if the hr folks have not been told by the top leadership, when you get this complaint, we want you to say thank you. That is a problem, were going to try to fix it. It has got to come from the top. It does not help for me to tell someone to complain to a supervisor at that supervisor is going to be rewarded for sweeping it under the rug. We have to shift the Workplace Culture so th