Workplaces should be safe spaces

There is no need to belabor the irony of various public figures making what have been widely considered as misogynistic remarks, being front and center in the news last March, which is National Women’s Month.

But to prevent employees from thinking that crude, rude, and lewd behavior is acceptable, employers would do well to revisit related legal obligations, particularly under Republic Act No. 11313 or the Safe Spaces Act. Among others, it requires employers to establish certain measures meant to prevent gender-based sexual harassment in workplaces, such as internal mechanisms to investigate complaints, and a code of conduct or workplace policy to reiterate the prohibited conduct and state their consequences.

The prohibited acts include not only any unwelcome sexual advances or requests for sexual favors or any act of a sexual nature, but “conduct that is unwelcome and pervasive and creates an intimidating, hostile or humiliating environment for the recipient.”

Providing training, complaint procedures and codes of conduct may seem easy enough to accomplish but an organization that is serious about compliance may also first need to recognize and understand ingrained mentalities that can impact actual implementation and compliance. No officer or employee will likely consider themselves as bastos or insensitive, and yet certain conduct might be routinely dismissed as just being humorous, “naughty,” or “playful” (and thereby seeking to reduce threatening acts by grown men to antics of little boys).

Objects of harassment may be seen as going along with the behavior (e.g, laughing it off), but organizational leaders will need to consider that many times the unspoken or even subconscious reason is that the object precisely is compelled to get along, to be accepted, or garner what a speaker in one podcast on this topic described as patriarchal benefits.

Today, most people probably know that inappropriate touching and sexual invitations are no-nos, but sexual harassment can take other forms.

In the case of LBC Express-Vis, Inc. vs. Palco (G.R. No. 217101, Feb. 12, 2020), a female employee of the petitioner reported to the company that she was being sexually harassed by a fellow employee who was a team leader — unwanted flirting, offers to lend money, touching including attempts to kiss the female employee (plus one that landed). The employer suggested that she request a transfer to another team. After about a week from filing a formal complaint, the employee resigned. She eventually filed a case against the employer for constructive dismissal, saying that the company, by allowing a working environment that was unsafe, had forced her to resign.

The Supreme Court ruled in her favor noting, among others, that there was unreasonable delay in the action taken by the company on the complaint. The company investigated the matter only after 73 days from the report, and suspended the harasser only after two months from the end of the administrative hearing or four months from the filing of the complaint, without having preventively suspended him before then. The persons in charge of the investigation had told the complainant that it would be difficult to prove her claims because there were no witnesses, and suggested that the kiss was a mere “beso.”

The Supreme Court court observed that “[i]ndifference to complaints of sexual harassment victims may no longer be tolerated. Recent social movements have raised awareness on the continued prevalence of sexual harassment, especially in the workplace, and has revealed that one of the causes of its pervasiveness is the lack of concern, empathy, and responsiveness to the situation. Many times, victims are blamed, hushed, and compelled to accept that it is just the way things are, and that they should either just leave or move on.”

In this case, the acts complained of took place before the Safe Spaces Act became law, so that the latter was not applicable, but the court still noted it to emphasize the need to “accord more importance to complaints of sexual harassment and recognize the severity of the offense” In the end the cause of the company’s liability was “insensibility, indifference and disregard” for the security and welfare of its employees.

The views expressed herein are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of her office as well as FINEX.

Rose Marie M. King-Dominguez is a senior partner of SyCip Salazar Hernandez & Gatmaitan and the head of the firm’s Special Projects Department. She is a FINEX member.