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7 Mistakes
You Can Avoid With
Email Harassment Cases
By Roger Matus, Chief Executive, Sean True, Chief Technology Officer,
and Chuck Ingold, Principal Research Engineer, InBoxer, Inc. |
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In its landmark 7-2 decision, the U.S. Supreme
Court ruled that employers are responsible for
harassment — even if they are not aware that it
is going on. Specifically, employers may be held
liable if the employer “should have known of the
conduct and fails to take immediate and appropriate
corrective action.” (Burlington Industries v.
Ellerth and Faragher v. City of Boca Raton)
The “should have known” standard is particularly
troublesome when harassment involves email.
How can a company know about every email message
from its employees when thousands of messages
are sent every day? Which messages should
the company know about?
The liability for not knowing about email harassment
can be substantial. While most harassment
cases are settled out of court with a confidential
result, a few well-known cases that centered on
email show the size of risk to business:
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Congressman Mark Foley of Florida abruptly
resigned as the result of emails and instant
messages he wrote to a former teenage male
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Chevron paid $2.2-million to four female
employees to settle a lawsuit in which they
claimed they were sexually harassed with email
jokes. |
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Two African American Morgan Stanley employees
filed a $60 million racial discrimination
lawsuit claiming racist jokes were disseminated
via email. The case was settled for an undisclosed
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The good news is that the U.S. Supreme Court
said that penalties and fines could be lessened
if the companies exercised “reasonable care” to
prevent and correct harassment. (Burlington
Industries v. Ellerth and Faragher v. City of Boca
Raton)
Many harassment suits are now focused on
whether companies exercised “reasonable care.”
Many companies compound their risk by the mistakes
they make when handling email. Fortunately,
there are steps that you can take as part of your overall anti-harassment program that may help.
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