Harassment

Congress is alarmed by the persistence of sexual harassment at work and the fact that almost every woman will at some point in her lifetime experience sexual harassment. A recent EU-Wide European study found that over a million women or one in every two in the EU had experienced sexual harassment since the age of 15 and in a third of these cases the harassment took place in a work context.

Conference notes with concern the fact that the vast majority of women don’t report harassment either to their employer or, where in a union, to their trade union.

Women working in all sectors of the economy and in all job roles are exposed to harassment but, as harassment is about power, women in casualised and insecure work and those at the lower ends of low paid grading structures are particularly vulnerable.

Recent research by Usdaw echoes the findings of larger scale studies showing that harassment by managers and customers is an issue of strong concern. The belief that ‘it’s an employee’s job to be friendly’ and ‘the customer is always right’ contribute to the lack of reporting and significantly limit women’s ability to deal with harassment. When women do report incidents, managers are usually reluctant to confront the customer.

Union membership amongst women is at an all-time high. This gives us an opportunity to make real progress in tackling sexual harassment at work. Sexual harassment at work can only be effectively tackled by the collective action of employers, trade unions and policy makers.

Conference urges the ICTU to make tackling the sexual harassment issues a high priority in all of its campaigning work.