Bottom-Up, Worker-Led Solutions

Long before #MeToo picked up steam in 2017, workers had been organizing at the grassroots level to address issues of gender, consent, sexual harassment, wages, and working conditions. Sexual harassment has costs to individuals and communities—personally, professionally, and emotionally—a burden that's intensified if you have no job security or ability to save wages. So pairing better work policies with education on sexual health and harassment at work, and collectively advocating to improve workplace standards, helps make workers less vulnerable.

Successful efforts have taken a multi-pronged approach: making sure workers have sufficient wages and space to process and respond to experiences of harassment, minimizing isolation at work, and improving worker capabilities to affect workplace culture through leadership training. Ultimately, making all work good work and creating learning tools so workers—collectively—can push for change at work and in their communities, can effect change when it has otherwise stalled.

Promising Solution 1: Find Creative Responses to Isolation in Workplaces

These plain-language initiatives range from public postings about unacceptable groping, nudity, and definitions of what a civil and acceptable workplace looks like, to approaches like the video and in-person training documented above in the legal change section. Workers have sought to introduce panic buttons for janitors, casino workers, and maids (particularly in Seattle, Las Vegas, and California), normalize the practice of working in pairs, and encourage self-defense classes to address harassment or assault when it happens. These initiatives were designed by and for workers in specific industries, inspired by farm-working women, and in particular by two groups—the Alianza Nacional de Campesinas and the Coalition of Immokalee workers, among others.

Promising Solution 2: Make All Work Good Work

Creating minimum wage laws, addressing unpaid overtime hours, ensuring benefits, and organizing unions strengthens the economic conditions of low-wage workers and redefines power structures. Grassroots activists have worked to help workers know they have a right to a living wage, civil work environment, and a right to contest discriminatory behavior. Recent examples include ROC United’s push to eliminate the tipped minimum wage, as well as efforts by Unite Here! Local 8 to ensure hotel maids have health insurance.

Certain industries, such as the hospitality industry, have sought to limit worker workloads (for example, the number of hotel rooms cleaned per hour) and to raise wages in the hope that if workers are paid a higher hourly rate and given a more manageable workload, they’re both less likely to be overworked and injured, and also more able to contest sexual harassment experiences.

Making all work good work and creating learning tools can effect change when it has otherwise stalled.

Promising Solution 3: Incorporate Trauma-Informed Responses

Many organizations are considering how transformative justice can feature in preventing and addressing sexual violence in communities that are under- or poorly served by law enforcement, (as in, for example, migrant communities who aren’t protected by and also fear law enforcement).

In a population that has both faced disproportionately high rates of sexual harassment and challenges around policing, communities recognize that creating community responses to harassment and violence, and educating and re-integrating perpetrators of lower-level harassment into a workplace through a graduated approach is vital to mitigating harassment and violence.

Ana Romero of the Chicago Workers Collaborative and Incite! suggests transformative strategies can include:

• Affirming community values and practices (such as freedom from harassment)
• Providing supportive services, physical space, or other resources to ensure the "safety and support to community members who are violently targeted that respects their self-determination.”
• Developing strategies to address behavior such as sexual harassment and violence that don’t involve imprisonment "such as creating a community accountability team to educate on and enforce standards of respect”
• Developing the wellbeing and capability of community members and the community

Leadership training for and with workers is one of the developing strategies to define and address gender-based violence, as well as develop the capability of community members, as these practices more quickly return someone who has graduated from a leadership program to work within their community. Among workers who have participated in Healing to Action’s training, for example, workers have pushed to campaign for how to improve communications skills when talking about gender-based violence, better sex education in schools, and community agreement around standards of behavior that could prevent and address sexual harassment.

Leadership training for and with workers is one of the developing strategies to define and address gender-based violence.

Promising Solution 4: Apply Pressure through Supply Chain Reform

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers Fair Food Program serves as a model for how to apply pressure through the supply chain, conduct worker-to-worker education, and develop third party reporting tools to combat sexual harassment in the farming industry.

In an industry where 80 percent of women report experiencing sexual harassment, and rape is common, the efforts of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) represent a model initiative for creating change within low-wage work. The program currently covers seven states, three crops, and 35,000 workers, and has the capacity to be expanded to low-wage industries and supply chains all over the world.

Because so many farmworkers are undocumented, and often excluded from U.S. labor laws even if documented, the CIW has experimented with ways to empower a population which effectively has no rights in the U.S. legal system.

First, CIW farm workers have lobbied consumers to put pressure on the largest sellers of produce—such as Walmart, Trader Joe's, and Whole Foods—to sign legally-binding agreements promising to only source tomatoes from Fair Food Farms with no outstanding wage theft, trafficking, sexual harassment, or other issues. This puts pressure on growers to become Fair Food Farms, which requires farms to be transparent with third party investigators and auditors who ensure farm workers have the right to work without violence and the opportunity to create a workplace of respect and dignity.

Second, each year workers with CIW educate thousands of their peers employed by a Fair Food Farm. They’re provided booklets and videos about their rights under the Fair Food Program, and discuss gender, consent, and harassment.

In the event that sexual harassment occurs, workers can file a claim in multiple languages and have the complaint investigated by a rigorous third party, 24-hours a day. Complaints are processed rapidly—80 percent are resolved within the month. In the case of sexual harassment, say a female farm worker is followed by a coworker who asks her out and makes vulgar jokes, the harassment can be reported to the Fair Food Program. An investigator would take down the confidential statement, speak with witnesses, and notify the company within 48 hours.

Workers can file a claim in multiple languages and have the complaint investigated by a rigorous third party, 24-hours a day.

If the individual or crew is found in violation of the code, depending on the severity of situation, there’s progressive discipline and retraining. The goal is to change minds and help perpetrators of harassment—mostly men—think through their actions and change, though persons found guilty of sexual assault are fired instantly. The CIW also suggests that quickly, fairly, and transparently addressing individual experiences of gender-based harassment and violence are important in demonstrating what behavior won’t be tolerated in a respectful work environment.

By protecting workers’ voices and promising real and meaningful consequences, this initiative changes the balance of power, the dynamic between workers and their bosses, and between men and women: no grower would keep employing one lecherous supervisor if the entire farm could lose the business of 14 of the world’s largest retailers. It also introduces the incentive of money: It’s no longer in the company’s or individual’s interest to turn a blind eye to abuse. According to CIW organizer Marley Moynahan, sexual harassment still happens, but targets have recourse, which makes it less likely that harassment will lead to assault.