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Comment by anon1252 | Hacker News Reader

> there's no real process in place for situations of misconduct in the office.

There shouldn't be a "process" set by Google when it comes to sexual harassment, employees should be able to sue, that's the process,sexual harassment is a crime, they can't sue because Google force them into arbitration, which should be illegal for an employer to do that to an employee IMHO. this is a denial of justice.

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Employers have a duty of care to protect employees from harm in the workplace, and that includes protection from sexual abuse.

A lot stuff that counts as sexual harassment in the work place is not a crime.

You don't sue people who perpetrate crimes, you prosecute them. You're asking the victims of sexual harassment to persuade police to investigate and prosecutors to prosecute, and we know that they won't because we know they already don't.

You're also saying that no action can be taken without meeting the very high criminal burden of proof - that this thing happened beyond all reasonable doubt. That's going to leave harassers free to continue.

Maybe you just meant that sexual harassment is unlawful and employees have an existing remedy through civil courts, but this would be pisspoor management. If your company employs people who reduce productivity of others in the workforce by sexually harassing them it's in the organisation's best interest to manage those people so they stop the harassment or leave the company.

> Employers have a duty of care to protect employees from harm in the workplace

Yet common bullying and generally abusive workplaces are completely legal in California. You have the right to quit anytime, not much else.

> Yet common bullying and generally abusive workplaces are completely legal in California.

They aren't covered by special, workplace-specific laws; there are, however generally-applicable civil laws that apply to them.

I think you're being too rigid. There are situations where one employee forces themselves on another at the christmas party. In that situation obviously the right call is to report it to the police and to have a disciplinary process internally for gross misconduct. But there's a million smaller examples of harassment that just need to be tackled by the organization. For example, if a man repeatedly makes comments about a woman's appearance, there needs to be a process where the woman can report that, be heard and have the issue addressed - it may be as simple as the employee's boss pulling the into a room and saying "stop being a creep". Not everything is solved by law suits.

However, obviously if things do escalate, access to the law should be guaranteed and the binding arbitration should clearly be dropped.

It's odd how on one hand, the consensus here is that the quality of the work environment is very important to the productivity and the wellbeing of employees. And on the other hand, people argue that this type of misconduct should not be punished unless it's literally illegal.

I think a lot of the hesitation is people fear kangaroo courts and termination without due process due to false accusations or exaggerations. Much as the extra legal stuff that goes on in college.

In other words, people here are more concerned with a phenomenon that is measurably rare relative to the downright epidemic that people are seeking to counteract. I think that says a lot about one's values.

Whether a phenomenon is rare has a lot to do with how common it is. People getting shafted by kangaroo courts is rare when kangaroo courts are rare. What happens when you make kangaroo courts common?

In my experience "cry-bullying" is not as rare as you make it out to be.

How rare false accusations are is completely irrelevant. If the goal is justice, then due process is non-negotiable. Period.

The goal is not justice. The goal is to limit the damage done by misbehaving employees, as cheap as possible.

No justice, no peace

What you have is an epidemic of powerful employees abusing their position to take advantage of junior employees.

What seems to be suggested to fight it are tools that would be extremely effective against other junior employees (even if the allegations are untrue), but only middlingly effective against the real problem of powerful employees.

That will understandably lead to push back from junior employees who fear abuse. Offer solutions which would primarily work against powerful employees and would be ineffective against other junior employees and I think there would be much more support.

Prosecution is one method of deterring thieves from robbing my store blind. I have also tried locked doors, security cameras and not leaving the store unattended.

I like your argument that it is cheaper to just let people rob me blind and then burn time and energy catching them, prosecuting time, and hoping for a conviction as a deterrent.

With any luck using your system crime will magically disappear on it’s own.

I am going to put my fingers in my ears now and make noises and ignore the worlds problems. It is certainly easier to not take responsibility. Good advice.

Comparing sexual assault to a store robbery in a tone of sarcasm is at best a poor judgement call.

I agree that assaulters need to take responsibility for their actions. However, when they don't, the law needs to be there to protect the victims.

Only if the law can prove beyond reasonable doubt that a crime happened, which is often difficult and why it makes sense to metaphorically secure the premises through an internal HR process as well.

I think it is poor judgment to create an organization that does nothing to secure its people from sexual harassment. Not sure why you would disagree but if that is what you intended I do not want to work for you.

Youre being incredibly unfair: That's not at all what I said, and your post I responded to also made no claim along these lines. You're misrepresenting my and your past statements.

What we were talking about is ending forced arbitration (the "process" referred to by the person you responded to) so that the law can be used to protect victims. That doesn't mean protections at work suddenly go away. It also doesn't mean suddenly employers will let sexual harassment run rampant either. It's not a binary either-or choice at all. So why not all protections.

The post I replied to implied that the criminal justice system is the only solution to these problems:

"employees should be able to sue, that's the process,sexual harassment is a crime, they can't sue because Google force them into arbitration,"

Notwithstanding the unbelievable confusion of law in that post is a whole other conversation.

I argued that companies should also have a plan in place to prevent sexual harassment at work by using an analogy to robbery, also a crime, that we use preventative measures to stop despite there being a criminal system punishing robbery.

Your response was claiming I was expressing poor judgment for arguing that companies are responsible for not creating environments rife for sexual harassment.

"Comparing sexual assault to a store robbery in a tone of sarcasm is at best a poor judgement call."

I don't agree. I think it's a reasonable demonstration of the absurdity of the position I'm replying to.

I don't know what else you wrote, but that's what I replied to.

Re-read his post: people should be able to sue in lieu of forced arbitration, they're never advocating for "create an environment for sexual assaults". Nowhere and no one is arguing for creating an environment for sexual assaults in this thread. The reason it seems like an absurdity is because you're setting it up to be one when no one is advocating it, which is the definition of a strawman.

Sorry, but if you're still going to stick on this point then this'll be the last thing I say on the matter.

This is a frustrating thread. Everyone is trying to outdo themselves. Feels like the Peoples front of Judea

> There shouldn't be a "process" set by Google when it comes to sexual harassment, employees should be able to sue, that's the process,

Except that, under the law, the company’s response (including the absence or inadequacy of any process) to certain situations is part of what determines if they are sexual harassment.

> sexual harassment is a crime

No, it's not, and if it were the process would not be for employees to sue, because crimes are prosecuted exclusively by the government in the U.S. legal system.

That’s actually not true, it varies by state, but many allow private criminal prosecutions to occur.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prosecution

Many? From the list I count six where the wording implies that a prosecution can occur without permission from the executive branch.

I wonder how often this actually happens? In any case this is interesting.

“Many” seems unwarranted (especially when it comes to prosecution of a charge rather than entry of a complaint or pursuit of an indictment), but, yes, that was an overgeneralization. But, it is by far the dominant rule.

it's a different country, but ... in India in 2013 some types of sexual harassment were deemed criminal and punishable by time in prison.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Law_(Amendment)_Act,_...

In the US, many types of sexual harassment are also crimes, but sexual harassment, per se, is a particular civil wrong, not a crime.

yes. i understand.

also: some types of sexual harassment that are not crimes in the US are crimes in India.

forced arbitration has been the bane of combatting anything legally. it basically is now used to completely remove any employee or consumer ability to sue. This is used for literally everything. Every employer does this now, every software product, every hardware.

I don't understand how this is even acceptable.

Because it doesn't actually do that. Only in the u.s. do people believe that suing over anything and everything is an efficient or effective mechanism of justice

"Sue it out" is probably the least effective possible conflict resolution mechanism along almost any axis.

The underlying goal of arbitration is to ensure effective resolution of non-complex situations and reserve the courts for actually complex cases, instead of now, where they are used because people hope they can make a bunch of money.

The only thing I'm aware of is people complain of bias of arbitrators using the proxy of how often business wins relative to people in courts (with no evaluation of whether people should be winning as much as they do in court).

Otherwise I have seen nothing that suggests that arbitration is not in fact very effective and efficient at reducing the cost and time involved.

the primary thing about arbitration

- it prevents class-action lawsuits

- it is funded typically by the company, and is very likely to agree with the company

Maybe suing constantly is an american thing, but if that is to be addressed it should be by congress not by individual companies wanting to circumvent civil law.

I'm not trying to troll you, but it's a voluntary "denial of justice". No one compels or coerces people to seek employment there. They apply, go through several interviews, and then voluntarily agree to whatever it is they agree to before day #1 of work. As long as people are willing to work there under XYZ conditions, people will continue to work there under XYZ conditions.

People voluntarily entered into indentured servitude once upon a time, too.

They didn't have options - every single Google employee(past and present) has options. They selected this one, voluntarily. Indentured servitude is not a valid analogy.

Most indentured servitude in the US was a voluntary agreement [1] although all such agreements are now illegal by the 13th amendment.

Also, there exist the concept of a so-called "unconscionable contract." I'm not saying this proposition is true, but I'm submitting for evaluation: is the act of submitting to private investigation processes that may be used as evidence against you in civil or criminal courts unconscionable?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servitude_in_the_...

They do not have any options where forced arbitration is not one of the conditions. Pretty much every corporation does this, so there are no realistic options for avoiding it.

There may be a very small number of cases where an employee successfully negotiated against this clause, but it probably requires the candidate to be a true outlier in terms of talent and skill set for the company to even consider it.

By the same token, employees are allowed to advocate for change once they are working there.

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