Employers Have Many Opportunities to Prevent and Correct Supervisor Harassment

An employer’s responsibility to exercise reasonable care to prevent and correct harassment is not limited to implementing an anti-harassment policy and complaint procedure.

If you’re in a situation where your employer has told you they’ve spoken to an abusive supervisor regarding misconduct against you, but the supervisor has failed to comply with the command that they discontinue harassing you, the Supreme Court has said this:

“The employer has a greater opportunity to guard against misconduct by supervisors than by common workers [because] employers have greater opportunity and incentive to screen them, train them, and monitor their performance.” Faragher, 118 S. Ct. at 2291.

Your employer has no room for excuses, when it comes to supervisor harassment. Your employer has many options available that have been listed in a previous post. These options include terminating the supervisor, placing the supervisor on probation, salary cuts, transfers, demotions, etc. The key is that your employer must exercise reasonable care to prevent and stop harassment or other misconduct.

Also, an employer’s duty to exercise due care includes instructing all of its supervisors and managers to address or report to appropriate officials complaints of harassment regardless of whether they are officially designated to take complaints and regardless of whether a complaint was framed in a way that conforms to the organization’s particular complaint procedures.

So, you can report harassment to any corporate official and they must take action by reporting your allegations to the appropriate corporate authorities. This is true whether or not you use the word “harassment” or follow a specific method of complaining of mistreatment.

Source: http://www.eeoc.gov/policy/docs/harassment.html