“Training has become an activity that corporations undertake to protect themselves from liability,” says Louise Fitzgerald, the professor emeritus with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who has conducted some of the foremost studies on sexual harassment. “The training itself is ineffective and counter-productive generally because a lawyer stands up and says ‘Thou shalt not do this and thou shalt not do that.’ Guys get defensive and it doesn’t do anything.
“People don’t do this stuff because they don’t know it’s wrong, which is the premise of current training,” she continues. “We have to have a different focus for the training on how we need to treat women with respect. It needs to be more proactive rather than reactive.”
The groups behind the training at Pacific Tomato were betting that it would have benefits precisely because it focused on changing workplace norms. As decades worth of research by Louise Fitzgerald and others has shown, when a company clearly communicates that sexual harassment is not tolerated, there is less of it. That was a key takeaway from the training in Florida—everyone at the farm had a responsibility to prevent sexual harassment from happening.
An organizational culture that repudiates sexual harassment also resonates with a growing consensus that onus of combating sexual harassment and assault cannot be placed only on the shoulders of victims. The research by Fitzgerald and others tells us that victims have a variety of valid reasons for not reporting the problem; when complaints are made, there can be negative consequences. “Going and making a complaint does not make things better and in some cases actually makes things worse,” Fitzgerald says.
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission task force was created out of the realization that the most common forms of recourse—complaining to the company, civil litigation, or pursuing a criminal case—are not a prevention strategy.
As the commissioners who chaired the task force put it in their report, sexual harassment has been a persistent problem. “With legal liability long ago established, with reputational harm from harassment well known, with an entire cottage industry of workplace compliance and training adopted and encouraged for thirty years, why does so much harassment persist and take place in so many of our workplaces?” the report asks.2 “And, most important of all, what can be done to prevent it?”
Fitzgerald was one of more than a dozen experts called to explain what their work had taught them about sexual harassment and what the research suggests will help eliminate it. “One of the great ideas to come out of that is that we’ve got to quit putting all responsibility on the complainant to ‘handle’ the situation,” Fitzgerald says.
Specifically, the task force proposed borrowing ideas from bystander intervention trainings, which have been shown to be effective at addressing sexual assault on college campuses. Programs like Green Dot, a program founded in 2009 by Dorothy Edwards, the founding director of the University of Kentucky Violence Intervention and Prevention Center, have already been used widely at universities, in the military, and at a variety of workplaces. Dubbed a “promising practice” by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Green Dot teaches bystanders and witnesses to harness the power of “peer influence” to disrupt a risky interaction.
The approach is based on the idea that small actions—even subtle interventions—can deter violence, and it ultimately seeks to move people from apathy to actively demonstrating intolerance for violence through even the smallest actions. As Edwards explained to the commission, the name of her organization comes from a simple metaphor: A map of a community awash with small red dots, which symbolize a harmful or violent choice or behavior. “We then suggest dropping a single green dot in the middle of the red dots,” Edwards told the commission. “A green dot is a small, single choice that someone makes that reduces the likelihood that the next red dot gets onto the map. . . . The goal is straightforward: When green dots begin to outnumber and displace the red dots, violence is reduced.”
Fitzgerald says bystander interventions like the Green Dot model can potentially reshape the culture of an organization or a community into one that doesn’t tolerate sexual harassment and violence. “A great deal of harassment is really quite public,” Fitzgerald says. “And if you can get other people, allies—really other men—to intervene in some of this, that is one possible way to address this.”
The training that took place at Pacific Tomato stands out for its attempts to change organizational culture, but it is also notable because the training is just one piece in a larger effort to create fair and safe working conditions for farmworkers through the Fair Food Program.
The Fair Food Program emerged out of a project of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers that sought to ensure fair and humane working conditions. Since its inception in 2011, the program has been explicit about its goal of reducing sexual harassment and assault in the fields.
The program has attracted attention and praise from the United Nations and former president Jimmy Carter because it has found a unique way to insist that workers’ rights are respected. It leverages consumer power to hold farms responsible for their labor practices while financially incentivizing growers to participate. The program began with a focus on tomato workers in part because Florida, where the Coalition of Immokalee Workers is based, produces a significant percentage of the country’s tomatoes. The program has since been expanded to operations in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and New Jersey, and to pepper and strawberry crops in Florida.
Through the infrastructure of the Fair Food Program, consumers have a role in demanding that retailers like Whole Foods Market or Taco Bell buy their Florida tomatoes only from farms that participate in the program. These buyers must also pledge to pay roughly a penny more per pound of premium tomatoes, which is passed on to the workers, and they are required to purchase produce from farms that follow the Fair Food code of conduct related to worker conditions.
There’s built-in accountability through annual audits and an opportunity to surface complaints through various avenues, such as a confidential complaint line and education sessions. These mechanisms have helped the program address everything from wage problems to sexual assault in the fields.
The audits are an especially novel and effective part of the program. During these site visits—some of which are announced and some of which are not—a team of inspectors meets with upper management to discuss expectations and to make sure the farm is complying with the code of conduct. The team also looks for evidence that the farm has made gains on any lapses observed from previous audits.
Most important, inspectors do a “reality check” with the workers, says Safer Espinoza, the director of the Fair Food Standards Council, which oversees the farm audits. At least half of the front-line supervisors and workers are interviewed to make sure that policies are being followed. Talking directly to a large sample of workers gives the organization a more accurate picture of what is actually happening out in the fields, she says.
To reach the workers, inspectors go where the workers are. They walk alongside tomato pickers in the rows during harvest. They ride the bus with workers from field to field. They visit farmworker housing. Some conversations span five minutes, while others run more than an hour.
During the interviews, workers are asked a host of questions aimed at assessing whether the farm is following the code of conduct. Were they hired directly by the farm as opposed to a third-party farm-labor contractor? What kind of training have they received? What did they think about it?
Inspectors also address the tricky subject of sexual harassment and assault. They ask workers if they are aware of both the program’s zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment and the farm’s individual policy. They check into whether the workers have been sexually harassed themselves or if they have witnessed any problems. If the worker describes specific incidents, the inspectors are required to forward the information to the grower.
Sexual harassment and assault is not an e
asy subject to broach, but the inspectors have refined their approach over the years. In the beginning, they fired off questions in a painfully straightforward way. “People would clam up and not say anything,” Safer Espinoza recalls. Now they ask, How is the work environment here for women? How is it for people of different sexual orientations? Or they might ask, Would you be comfortable with your mother or sister working here?
Workers find it easier to confide in the inspectors because the Fair Food Program has a track record of helping workers resolve problems. Calls to the Fair Food Program’s twenty-four-hour complaint hotline—where workers can call in confidentially with any kind of job-related problem—are taken by the same inspectors who visit them in the fields during an audit.
Angel García, the human resources manager from Pacific Tomato, says that the Fair Food Program creates an infrastructure that helps growers get a feel for the concerns and complaints of their workers. “There are farmers with good hearts but they are not in the fields and they don’t know what is happening in their fields,” he says. “Through the audit system, we take the pulse of the operation. We are not a perfect operation but we have a third-party entity and if they find something, we will fix it.”
The audits are not just an empty exercise. If sexual harassment is found on a farm, the consequences are swift and serious. For example, if physical sexual harassment by a supervisor is reported, the farm is required to fire that supervisor. If it doesn’t, the farm will be suspended from the program and no longer able to sell to the dozenplus participating buyers, including McDonald’s and Walmart.
“I’m amazed how much compliance the ability to sell their product means,” Safer Espinoza says. “When you can’t make your sales because workers are abused, that is a real issue for the company, and it highly incentivizes compliance.”
In the half-dozen years since its founding, the program has made noticeable differences in the fields where it operates, including an improved working environment for female farmworkers. The Fair Food Standards Council’s 2015 annual report says that the response to sexual harassment and assault has improved on the farms where they have a presence. In 2012 and 2013, three longtime supervisors were fired for sexual harassment following an audit, which made them ineligible for reemployment for two years among all of the Fair Food growers. In the 2014 and 2015 seasons, the audits did not turn up any cases of violence or sexual assault by supervisors. The program has helped worker advocates “move from prosecution to prevention with regard to sexual violence in the fields,” the report says.3
Safer Espinoza is confident that Fair Food Program farms reduce sexual violence thanks to the worker rights training, the complaint hotline, and the thorough auditing. “I’d say we have the best chance of knowing about these problems that anyone has ever had in this population,” she says. “If there were rampant sexual assault, we’d hear about it through any combination of factors.”
She points to the hotline, which has helped the program resolve more than 1,700 worker complaints of all kinds. “The hotline has slowed in terms of seriousness but not in terms of the volume of calls,” she says. “We see it as a mechanism for resolving problems,”
It is within this larger context that the sexual harassment and domestic violence training at Pacific Tomato in the spring of 2016 had meaning, says Marley Moynahan of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, who served as a trainer that day. “If you dropped this training into a farm outside of the Fair Food Program, the workers would connect with what is happening, but the reality is that they would never exercise their rights,” she says. “The training is only powerful so far as it translates into reality and a safe place to talk about it.”
That the Fair Food Program considers reducing sexual harassment part of ensuring a safe and healthy workplace is a simple but crucial recasting of the problem. It may seem subtle, a matter of semantics, but by defining rape—in the fields, on the janitorial night shift, or in a home that is a caregiver’s workplace—as a health and safety issue, it becomes possible to conceive of it as something preventable.
Immigrant women workers whose jobs place them in physical isolation and who are vulnerable to sexual abuse precisely because they face financial, social, and practical barriers to reporting it are at a unique risk for exploitation. Because the dynamics that facilitate the abuse can be reasonably anticipated, it is possible to address them directly. For example, janitorial companies could shift to daytime work hours or assign cleaners to work in pairs. Female farmworkers could work in all-women crews. Domestic workers could wear panic buttons to reach law enforcement if they find themselves attacked and mistreated—as hotel cleaners already do in some parts of the country.
The current focus on helping workers seek recourse means that vulnerable workers are getting assistance only after the sexual violence has happened. The women featured in this book who recount being raped or assaulted—Georgina Hernández, who cleaned a Los Angeles hotel lobby; the female farmworkers who labored in the orchards of the Yakima Valley; and June Barrett, who took care of the most personal needs of an elderly man in Miami—certainly would have benefited from an effort to prevent on-the-job sexual harassment.
Attempts to reframe extreme sexual harassment as a health and safety issue are gaining traction. In the Yakima Valley of Eastern Washington, Victoria Breckwich Vásquez, a nursing and health studies professor at the University of Washington–Bothell, is bringing together researchers, growers, health clinicians, worker rights advocates, and farmworkers to take steps toward sexual harassment prevention.
Her work is a mainstay of the university’s Pacific Northwest Agricultural Safety and Health Center, whose aim is to create safe working conditions for farmworkers. In the past, it has focused on issues like pesticides and heat illness. In recent years, it has turned its attention to sexual harassment and assault in the region’s fields and orchards.
“We’ve been hearing for years that this is an issue that plagues the workplace for agricultural workers,” Breckwich Vásquez says, “and no one thought of it as an occupational health issue. We take it for granted that work is one of the safest places to go.”
Breckwich Vásquez has focused on reaching the farmworkers in the Yakima Valley with information on how to identify and report sexual harassment so that problems can be addressed before they escalate to extreme levels. She has created a Spanish-language radio drama on the topic, and growers in the area are distributing wallet-size cards that her organization designed with information on how to make complaints about sexual harassment. She is also developing a training video that will draw directly from the experiences of farmworkers—a project that echoes the efforts of the Fair Food Program and its partners—with an evaluation component that will look at whether the training has achieved the desired impact.
Rethinking sexual harassment as a problem that can be tackled through workplace health and safety regulations is a seemingly subtle shift that could have significant impacts. By looking at the issue through the lens of health and safety, Breckwich Vásquez says, she and others pushing for this change are demanding an answer to a fundamental question: “If you don’t have security at work, how are you supposed to support your family?”
It’s a paradigm shift that has already happened in other countries, like Canada. In Ontario, the province’s department of labor sets clear standards and guidelines on how to address workplace sexual coercion. In the United States, though, the concept faces obstacles to wider adoption. Currently, there is no U.S. federal regulation that specifically lays out what is required of employers when it comes to workplace violence prevention in general.4
However, under the Occupational Safety and Health Act, an employer must provide a job and workplace “free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm to his employees”—including sexual assault or rape. This responsibility is known as the “general duty clause” of the act.
How to fulfill this responsibility has been
the subject of debate and disagreement, because the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has never issued so-called workplace violence standards, which would spell things out clearly for employers and workers. Instead, OSHA has created voluntary guidelines for employers that are viewed as best practices. OSHA recommends, for instance, that companies draft a written violence prevention plan.
Under the general duty clause, employers are not expected to stop every random act of violence that happens at work. OSHA is, however, empowered to issue a citation and levy a fine against a company if a worker is injured in an act of violence that could have been prevented and reasonably anticipated.
OSHA has focused much of its workplace violence prevention energy on health care workers, late-night retail employees, and taxi drivers. Extreme sexual harassment, such as assault and rape, have not historically been the province of OSHA, although in 2016 there were signs that the agency was beginning to place a greater emphasis on them.
In a Day's Work Page 16