“Somehow it wasn’t a priority to address my sexual assault,” Katie Brennan — the New Jersey official who accused a fellow staffer in the admnistration of Gov. Phil Murphy of rape — told a special legislative committee earlier this week.
This lack of urgency is something we in New York are all too familiar with. It took New Jersey all of two months to convene public hearings; in New York we’ve been waiting for them for 223 days.
With hearings ongoing in Trenton, there’s been an equally significant development in Albany: the creation of the Sexual Harassment Working Group — founded by seven former legislative staffers who experienced, witnessed or reported sexual harassment. The SHWG seeks to create a harassment-free Albany and by extension, a harassment-free New York, by exposing the deeply rooted, pervasive culture of sexual harassment and discrimination that has long been swept under the rug in many workplaces.
In addition to outlining policy recommendations that strengthen workplace harassment protections, the group has called upon the state to conduct public hearings and consider testimony from those who’ve had firsthand experiences with workplace sexual harassment, alongside experts and advocates.
Better processes lead to better outcomes.
Instead of limiting information and continuing to silence victims, we need transparency and well-informed policy. This begins with public hearings on sexual harassment, the last of which was held in 1992 — 26 years ago — and included more than 30 public events, regional meetings, and a major outreach effort to solicit extensive public input and discussion in conjunction with private meetings.
As noted in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Select Task Force on the Study of Workplace Harassment, to actually prevent harassment, the culture of an organization must change. A crucial step in this cultural change is the creation of a public platform for survivors to speak their truth.
That is why, together, we drafted and circulated a letter asking the state Legislature to convene these hearings; 23 members of the Assembly and 22 senators have already signed on. Effective worker protections must consider the viewpoint of workers from all industries; laws written without worker input cannot be credibly expected to improve their conditions.
While it’s true that New York did recently update its harassment laws, it did so in the context of the state budget — and behind closed doors, the same way in which harassment often occurs. Some updates included limiting nondisclosure agreements in sexual harassment settlements and no longer permitting employers to require mandatory arbitration.
But these changes, although certainly a strong step in the right direction, lacked the input of important stakeholders and are therefore dangerously incomplete. Although well-intentioned, the new laws fail to offer concrete accountability measures and do not address important nuances that victims can speak to. Elected officials should not cite the 2018 laws as a reason that the job is done; New York cannot afford a wait-and-see approach.
If New York State is to be the progressive leader it so readily claims to be, it must lead on issues concerning workplace safety and gender equity by elevating survivors’ voices to expose gender-based discrimination and harassment. Because for decades the state has failed to provide many of its workers a safe, harassment-free environment, it is clear that the legislature must center the stories and experiences of survivors to inform policy moving forward.
Quart serves parts of the Upper East Side and Midtown East in the state Assembly. Vladimer is an attorney and one of the co-founders of the Sexual Harassment Working Group.
