Boca Raton Employment Law Blog

Employers in Florida and throughout the country are generally required to provide workplaces that are free from sexual and other types of harassment. However, a study conducted by Pan Atlantic Research of Portland found that this isn't necessarily the case for individuals living in Maine. Of those who responded, 21.9% of men and 23.4% of women said that they had seen sexual harassment take place at work. Furthermore, 57.6% of female respondents said that they had been victims of such harassment themselves.

This was roughly three times the number of male respondents who said that they had experienced sexual harassment themselves. The study also found that both workers and employers feel the same about the potential consequences of reporting harassment in the workplace. Nearly half of employers said that reporting sexual harassment at work could threaten a person's career. Among workers who took part in the survey, 63.8% said that reporting harassment put their jobs at risk.

Upcoming decisions from the Supreme Court of the United States could have an impact on how businesses in Florida treat LGBT workers. Among major corporations, support has been growing to interpret Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as inclusive of LGBT people. In a friend-of-the-court brief signed by 206 companies, business leaders urged the high court to recognize discrimination against LGBT people as a type of unlawful sex discrimination.

The brief declared that an unfavorable ruling against this class of people would hurt businesses and workers. Across the country, legal protections vary and leave many workers vulnerable to mistreatment at work. Inconsistent protection restricts companies' ability to attract talented workers from diverse backgrounds.

Black women in Florida and across the U.S. are more likely to be subjected to and report workplace sexual harassment than white women, according to a new study. The study was recently published in the journal Gender, Work and Organization.

Researchers analyzed sexual harassment complaints filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission between 1997 and 2016. They found that overall sexual harassment complaints by female workers fell by around 40% over the 20-year period, but the decrease varied significantly among different races. For example, sexual harassment complaints by white women dropped from 16,000 in 1997 to 9,600 in 2016, which represents a 70% decrease. However, complaints from black women dropped only 38% over the same period of time. In addition, the study found that black women were 3.4 times more likely to report sexual harassment than white women in 2016, which is up from 1.7 times more likely in 1997.

Workers experiencing discrimination in Florida need not file complaints first with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission prior to suing employers in federal court. In a rare unanimous decision from the Supreme Court of the United States, the justices ruled that the requirement in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act that compels people to complain first to the EEOC, or its equivalent state agency, did not automatically force federal courts to dismiss workplace discrimination cases that had not first sought relief through the EEOC.

Employers, however, retain the power to request that a court dismiss a case if they alert a court in a timely manner that the plaintiff did not inform the EEOC. An employer that waits too long to raise the issue could miss the chance to have a case dismissed for failure to take the problem to the EEOC.