Undeterred by my confession of ignorance, he proceeded to tell me about it and bend my ear a bit. About 45 minutes later, he had a story with an expert source (me), touching on national origin harassment, harassment training, and workplace culture — and I had another nice media mention.
National origin-based remarks are bad news.
The EEOC lawsuit involves a quantitative analyst’s complaint that he was fired after being verbally harassed about being an Iranian and a Muslim. Alleged comments included being told that “the reason you are not allowed on the trading floor is because you are from a country which has a high risk factor and a threat.”
Seriously, a couple of points:
Do as I say in harassment training, not as I do.
Jon’s angle was that there’s a disconnect between the ideal harassment-free world of harassment and EEOC training sessions and strict official corporate policies, on the one hand, and the real trading-floor world that, he says, has more of a locker-room atmosphere, on the other.
Sorry to disappoint you locker-room stock traders, but the essence of my response is:
If your employer’s diversity guidelines say one thing but workplace culture says something different, “Follow the policy,” Lenard says. If you don’t, and something you said gets cited in a discrimination complaint, you won’t be able to save yourself by pointing out that you just did what everyone around you was doing. “There is a high likelihood that you are going to be scapegoated and pushed out of there, if something like this happens,” says Lenard.
If there seems to be a disconnect between what a company preaches in harassment and EEOC training sessions and what it appears to practice in the day-to-day workplace, chances are the wagons will circle tightly around company policy as soon as someone complains, with the “do as I tell you, not as I do” crowd firmly reasserting command.
EEOC has much interest in anti-Muslim cases post-9/11.
Jon also quoted me as saying: “Since 9/11 they’ve (the EEOC) been interested in Muslim and Middle East kind of discrimination cases. It’s really a sensitive area.”
Cases in point:
Read the whole story at the eFinancialCareers financial services careers site:
EEOC vs. Merrill Lynch: Perils of Workplace Culture
Find Diversity employment at DiversityJobs.com.
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[...] Lessons from an EEOC Wall Street harassment lawsuitThe other day, out of the blue, I got a call from Jon Jacobs, a writer for eFinancialCareers, a financial services industry job site. Jon asked me if I had heard about a case recently filed by the EEOC against Merrill Lynch. … [...]