New York Sexual Harassment Lawyer Blog

The EEOC has filed a lawsuit under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act against an upscale steakhouse in New York City. It is alleged that male management groped and made sexual comments to other male employees. After the victims of the harassment complained about the unwelcome sexual behavior, management retaliated by assigning the complainants “less desirable” work. Subsequently, the victims were terminated.

In commenting on the case, EEOC New York District Director Spencer H. Lewis Jr. stated, “EEOC is determined to stop sexual harassment whether faced by men or women.” The case has been filed in the U.S. District in the Southern District of New York. The EEOC's press release can be found at http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/12-31-09.cfm.

According to a recent article in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, a male registered nurse, Roy E. Dreshman, Jr., has filed a claim against his former employer, Henry Clay Villa, in the United States District Court in Pittsburgh for sexual harassment, gender discrimination and age discrimination. In the complaint, Dreshman alleges that soon after two of his co-workers recognized him to be a former stripper, some employees began to pass around photographs of him as a dancer, solicited lap dances, asked him to perform at bachelorette parties and groped him. One employee even decorated her office with a poster of Dreshman as a male stripper. Residents of the nursing home also participated in discriminatory conduct against Dreshman by telling him, “Oh, my gosh, you are one of them go-go boys,” and calling him a “hootchie-kootchie dancer.”

Dreshman also alleges that the nursing home discriminated against him based on his gender and age by favoring female nurses for full-time positions over male nurses. Dreshman was told that he was a "pretty boy" and that "males did not ‘belong’ in the nursing field.” In the complaint, he also alleges that instead of launching an investigation after receiving his complaint, the management of the nursing home retaliated against him, leading to his ultimate termination.

A recent article in The New York Times reported on the increase in complaints of discrimination in the workplace. The article went on to state that, “federal job discrimination complaints by workers against private employers rose by 9% last year, the biggest annual increase since the early 1990s.”

Based on the article, one might reasonably conclude that job discrimination has intensified. Another reasonable conclusion might also be that more individuals who suffer discrimination in the workplace have been able to observe, from their experiences, that those who complain of employment discrimination do not suffer the results of reporting employment discrimination to the same extent they did previously.

There is a reasonable likelihood to believe that it is not necessarily the increase in discriminatory conduct that caused the number of individuals who report employment discrimination to be greater than before. Instead it could be that individuals have learned that reporting discriminatory acts does not necessarily produce retaliation. The strong workplace retaliation laws that our lawmakers have enacted throughout our country have, in large part, effectively protected those who report discrimination from the retaliatory conduct they feared in the past.