Posted on 11/13/2011 8:41:23 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
As Baynative states, if you add up the countless hours spent in every corporation of any significant size, in “sensitivity” training, the cost of sexual harassment issue is lot higher. The bigger the corporation, higher the cost of this type of nonsense which does not contribute 1 cent towards the real goal of any outfit, which is to make a profit and survive the competition domestic and foreign.
Not only this hurts the bottom line, it actually creates a work force which is on the edge. For crying out loud when you are hired in a corporation, you must put aside trivial issues and focus on making a profit.
In my opinion, sexual harassment truly occurs only when a boss uses his/her position to blackmail the subordinate for sexual favors. Just commenting on someone’s appearance without using profanity is in no shape or form sexual harassment. That is PC gone berserk. No wonder Asian countries are taking American jobs away, they do not waste time on such non-productive nonsense. They are literally laughing at us.
Honestly, I think the charges are B.S. against Cain. The far left FEAR Herman Cain.
Let’s pretend for one minute the allegations were all true......,
I STILL would prefer a Womanizer in the White House over a Marxist/Communist/Socailist!
At any rate, I think Cain is a honest man and I do trust him way more than Newt, Romney and Obama.
Nope, there are reports that maybe four woman saw Herman Cain in the late 90s and he was smiling or laughing or leering or drinking wine or eating food or making hand gestures suggesting height, but four women have yet to come forward and accuse Herman of anything.
The one woman, sharon buy-a-lick that has made a charge, Herman claims not to know her and was not with her alone in a car.
The one woman that received a payoff from the NRA in return for non-disclosure, has had her lawyer come out and mush mouth his way through a couple of pressers, but not a single charge was brought.
Twelve years later, anyone can claim anything and it's impossible to prove a negative.
1988 was 23 years ago if the same number of resolutions happened annually then there have been 391,000 sexual harassment since then, so it is common place.
Don't minimize it.
So, find any proof about Cain
Let's see, I said: "It seemed to have happened in Cain's case, but that's true without having to pretend it happens all the time."
But I'm pretty sure you aren't asking me to PROVE that in Cain's case, the women got paid large amounts of money when without good claims of harrassment.
So what exactly do you want me to prove? The opposite of what I said? Why would anybody do that?
Do you have any evidence that it was normal in the late 90s for women to get paid a year's salary simply for making up claims of harrassment? Exceptions don't prove the rule, you'll need some statistics.
Or will you prove my point?
Again, that’s nice anecdotal evidence. How much were the payouts? How many of them relative to the population of women? Do you know of ANY men who claimed harrassment and got paid off? How do you know the charges were false?
We do annual harrassment training. My guess is most companies do these days, because it is very helpful to beat harrassment suits.
In my opinion, the NRA was the kind of place that might pay out on frivolous charges. They lobbied the government for special treatment and favorable regulations. They were essentially a public relations firm for the restaurant industry. They couldn’t afford to have even rediculous charges aired against their top spokesman and CEO. So they could well find it cheaper for THEM to pay out big money rather than risk a lawsuit.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if specific complaints against CEOs tend to get paid out for more money, and with less paperwork. Although again, that would be exeptional cases — it’s not like the average woman at a firm ever gets into a position where they could interact with, much less be harrassed by, the CEO of the company.
I’m just arguing that this wasn’t the norm, and it’s silly to argue it’s the norm. It’s easier to argue why the NRA might have paid out large sums than the norm, than to pretend that every woman is a gold-digger who could make up harrassment claims for easy payouts.
Did I say 1988? Damn. That data was from 1998. I picked a year corresponding to the year we were discussing.
If you go look at the chart at the link, it shows the data from 1997 through 2010.
What is interesting is the non-litigation monetary payouts (that’s what I’m talking about here, payouts to settle suits without going to court) have been pretty constant through the time period; the number of harrassment claims have been dropping, so the payout per claim has obviously gone up somewhat, but not a significant amount.
My guess is that there are fewer EEOC/state/local complaints because companies have done a good job with harrassment training.
I wouldn’t say that Cain has been “unequivocal” in his statements, but I don’t dispute the possibility that what you say is true. Cain was aware of some agreement, but didn’t think it was a settlement, then he got briefed by someone, probably a lawyer, and said it was a termination settlement, and another time he called it by another name. I don’t think what he called it is that important, because he wasn’t a party to the termination agreements, and one happened after he had left the NRA.
I certainly don’t believe that people who are found to file false charges and are fired for it tend to get 1-year-payment severance packages. But if you have information to show that, I’d be interested. Most times I hear about pepole getting fired from their jobs, they are lucky to get 2-weeks payout just to sign a paper saying they won’t sue the company for firing them.
My argument is about the norm, not about a specific case. That’s why it’s not important to my argument what happened specifically relative to the payouts made to the two women. I use “payouts” to avoid the whole argument over the mechanism by which they were paid.
RE:"My guess is most companies do these days, because it is very helpful to beat harassment suits."
Having a paper trail is always helpful in a litigation. Experience tells me the borderline ridiculous sensitivity training creates an atmosphere of both intimidation and humorous mocking of the entire process by those who know (and have come to trust) one another.
At the corporation I was a part of there were times when a male supervisor would avoid going into a copy room or break room if a woman was in there alone. We even had a black woman sue the company for creating a hostile workplace because a Mexican woman came to work with her hair done in corn rows. The black woman said she was being mocked openly because everyone knows that hair do is indigenous to Africa.
My guess is that the wasted hundreds of millions spent on this pursuit of nothing spawned more litigation than it avoided. I'll add that at the height of the harassment industry's growth we all watched the Bill Clinton foibles played out in the media with an integral part of that drama being the National Organization of Women, that had pushed the legislative issue, standing firmly behind Clinton and lining up against the women he abused. That played louder than the "training" we were forced to endure.
see above
I tried to explain that in the post you replied to.
Having your wife come forward prevents the negative appearance that your wife won’t even vouch for you. It is pretty much EXPECTED that a wife would come forward.
So it’s not that helpful for proving innocence, but if she didn’t come forward it would suggest guilt, so it is “helpful”, it just isn’t “all that helpful”.
To use a rough analogy, if you are deeply in debt, they often recommend that your first step is to cut up your credit cards. That doesn’t really help get you out of debt, in that it doesn’t pay off anything. But if you don’t do it, you are likely to just charge up more debt, which would be bad.
Great. Thank you.
Respectfully, on one hand we have FR members arguing that the settlements were a pittance and therefore prove that the claims weren't true . . . and on the other hand, we're calling them a juicy severance package?
Were you aware that a book published in 1998 (right in the ballpark of the settlements of the accusations against Cain) stated that only 60% of sexual harassment claims filed with the EEOC found 'reasonable cause'?
And I would imagine that the EEOC would find sexual harassment anywhere it was possible to claim it.
Charles? I was a Cain supporter. I don't know now. I'm sitting back and waiting. I'm an attorney (statement made with self-loathing). I posted some figures from 1998 on sexual harassment as well.
I also posted Humpty-Dumpty's quote from Through the Looking Glass on another thread. ('When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.)
You call a settlement payment whatever you want to call it. If the employee is going to be leaving, you call it a severance payment so that the company can 'honestly' say it didn't pay a settlement payment. (If the employee already has bad reviews, unscrupulous people agree to call it a termination with severance, so the employee can also receive unemployment). All of this about the payments being severance payments are completely meaningless.
We don't know whether people were asking him to rescue other failing restaurant/food divisions or companies, and he was turning them down due to burnout or "been there, done that" syndrome, or whether nobody was approaching him due to some reason.
Those are merely questions. I believe Cain to be an honorable man. However, answering them with Herman Cain's answers is not definitively answering them, and i don't believe we will have definitive answers. Cain is not going to say "because I had to leave the NRA due to harassment claims" any more than he is going to say, "when I made that hand motion about my wife's height, I joked that you must be this tall to ride this ride, which was inappropriate and I apologize."
I'm not trying to cast slurs; my posting history will show support of Cain. Those are simply elephants in the room.
I'm not a noobie, folks. My case against Romney is in my tagline. My case against Perry is that, as a genetic Texan, I know that any Texas Aggie should have been conservative enough to have been a Republican from the get-go (that's Texas for "beginning"), and I don't buy the late life 'epiphany' as being timely. Soul-searching conservative Texans who weren't crowd following politicians weren't Yellow Dog Democrats as late as Perry, not even we Tea Sips. I politely request that if you have responses, you not make them personal attacks.
When Cain left the NRA in 1999, he explored running for President, and then joined the Steve Forbes campaign as a national chairman. I would presume that to do that, it was useful to not be the CEO of a lobbying organization.
So I wouldn’t read anything into the timing from Cain’s point of view. His leaving I guess COULD have contributed to their payment to the 2nd woman though, since without Cain there maybe they figured it wasn’t worth fighting over — but we have no visibility into the reasons for the payouts, so unless someone gives us information, we don’t really know.
I still haven’t seen PROOF of any “second” severance package.
Thanks. And it would be useful not to be the CEO of a food industry company, or head of a division. I believe the NRA was his only lobbying experience. He had an excellent reputation as a turn-around man in the food industry prior to the NRA.
Since I joined in February of 1998, FR has been a source for information and for open discourse and asking questions. There have been few topics where simply curiosity and presenting objective data from one's own profession or experiences has been attacked. The entire Cain matter has been one in which I've seen people attacked as being left-tarded or supporters of other candidates simply for asking questions or for presenting data (not even opinions, but data) contrary to what has become 'group think.'
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