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When the boss becomes aggressive, employers often look the other way – with devastating consequences. This is shown by a data analysis.
A young real estate agent starts a new job in an agency in Basel. In the office, the male employees make disreputable remarks towards her. The situation is difficult for her. But your manager doesn’t intervene – on the contrary.
On a business trip, he approaches her. She blocks. He sends her a personal postcard, sends a suggestive picture of himself. When she does not respond to his advances, he fires her “due to poor performance”.
The woman defends herself and sues the cantonal arbitration board for discrimination through sexual harassment and discriminatory dismissal. The position comes to the end: The employer did not protect the woman enough from the attacks. She reaches a settlement and gets financial compensation.
Supervisors sexually harass their employees – and employers do too little about it. Such cases happen almost every day in Switzerland, but very few victims defend themselves legally. SRF Data has analyzed 218 legally concluded cases from the last 28 years. The cases are based on a survey by the University of Bern, which asks all courts and arbitration boards about court cases in the field of sexual harassment in the workplace every year Gender Equality Act.ch published.
What ends up in court is only a fraction of the sexual harassment actually committed, but the cases at hand give a picture of how sexual harassment is dealt with in the Swiss working world.
Most employers took insufficient protective measures
The federal law on equality between women and men (equality law) has been in force since 1995 and makes employers responsible. They should protect their employees from discrimination and sexual harassment – and take preventive measures, such as ensuring that the company does not tolerate sexual harassment or that a person of trust is created as a contact point.
The analysis by SRF shows: In the majority of the cases analyzed (69 percent), it turned out that the accused companies did not comply with the preventive measures prescribed by law in the area of ”prevention of sexual harassment in the workplace”. Specifically, there were specific references in the court documents in 150 cases. In 17 cases (8 percent) the measures were complied with by the employer, in 51 cases (23 percent) there was no indication of this.
Agota Lavoyer, an expert on sexualised violence, says if your employer takes insufficient measures, this could have devastating consequences: “For employees, this means that they cannot trust that if they report an incident, it will be investigated .
Because of this, incidents of harassment are rarely reported; instead, employees prefer to leave rather than report a case. This is devastating – for the employer and the employees.”
Above all, superiors are perpetrators
Even if the employer is at the center of a lawsuit relating to the Equal Opportunities Act and criminal proceedings for sexual harassment against the perpetrator are often running at the same time, conclusions about the perpetrators can be drawn from the data.
In a large proportion of the cases (44 percent), the perpetrator was the superior and thus includes a clear abuse of power. A smaller proportion (19 percent) was an employee. In another part of the cases (37 percent), the court documents do not state who the perpetrator was.
For the expert Agota Lavoyer it is clear: sexual harassment is always an abuse of power: “Power protects the perpetrator. It is very difficult for those affected to disclose harassment if the harasser is a manager because the person concerned is in a dependent relationship. At the same time, power protects the abuser because the company tells itself it can’t afford to fire that boss.”
Most cases end in arbitration
The vast majority of the plaintiffs who sued their employers for failing to address sexual harassment are women (93 percent). And: Almost seventy percent of the cases could be clarified before an arbitration board.
In most of these cases, plaintiffs and employers were able to agree on compensation payments averaging CHF 10,000. This can involve additional payments of wages owed as well as compensation for pain and suffering. In the period from 2000 to 2020, the average amount of financial compensation doubled.
Contact point for victims of sexual assault at work
However, not all of the cases can be clarified before an arbitration board. If no agreement can be reached, the case is often referred to a court. This happens about 20 percent of the time. In the cases examined, 40 percent were in favor of the prosecution and 60 percent in favor of the accused companies. However, the number of court cases has fallen sharply in recent years.