In the business world of today, sexual harassment against women in the workplace is still a controversial topic. This article is based around sexual harassment and how it has evolved out of a stereotypical definition. However, “Sexual harassment is broadening to include harassment of men by women, homosexual harassment and even more recently, incidents involving harassment of workers by customers or clientele, commonly known as third-party harassment.” (Mauricio Velasquez, New Era in Sexual Harassment). In order to battle this, companies have created sexual harassment policies in response to the court’s treatment of Sexual Harassment complaints.
This article explains how the how sexual harassment has changed over the past few years. The reading explains that “Sexual harassment is broadening to include harassment of men by women, homosexual harassment and even more recently, incidents involving harassment of workers by customers or clientele, commonly known as third-party harassment.” (Mauricio Velasquez, New Era in Sexual Harassment).
Also, how these incidents are being treated. Procedures for dealing with harassment cases should be consistent, regardless of gender or status. Employers are responsible for the conduct of supervisors and managers. Employers also have a responsibility to protect their employees from harassment by non-employees.
Velasquez discusses how third party harassment has become more recognized and how companies and practitioners respond to such issues. Third party harassment is committed by clients, customers or vendors. “The law is interpreted to apply only to “employees,” clearly excluding self-employed individuals. This leaves those victims in professional services such as law, accounting, medicine and consulting with no legal recourse.” (Mauricio Velasquez)
The article covers a company’s affect when Upper management investigates and responds quickly to every complaint. Many businesses have found that a company works well when all of the parts are striving towards the same goal. For situations where people are fighting amongst themselves or a person has a grievance against their co-workers, human resource departments feature a variety of remedies to help the process of coping or solving the problem along.
“Companies should not tolerate such behavior from their staff or management at any time and will suffer grave consequences if they choose to ignore complaints and take no action to stop the behaviors.” (Mauricio Velasquez) Sexual harassment today is much easier to do in the workplace with business to business interactions, internet availability, changes in gender roles; however it is also something that has been taken seriously especially in recent decade.
Here is the link to the article itself: http://stopharass.com/article-sexual-harassment.htm