Most Companies Don't Tolerate GCs Who Sexually Harass, Experts Say
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Alphabet Inc. CLO David Drummond may have saved his job after a consensual sexual relationship with a female subordinate when he was general counsel, but not all GCs are as fortunate.
Drummond was part of the revelations in last week’s report from The New York Times that alleged that several high-ranking men at the company faced little or no consequences for inappropriate sexual relationships with women in their departments, some of which were consensual. Some of the men left Google with multimillion-dollar severance packages.
John Gilmore, co-founder of legal recruiter BarkerGilmore, said some other general counsel have not fared as well. “I know of one person let go because of an inappropriate relationship inside the company who was having trouble getting a new job,” Gilmore said. The problem didn’t surprise Gilmore. “If a general counsel crosses that line, it’s almost a career-ending move,” he said. “Good judgment is a big deal to companies.”
In July, Wayne Levin, the former general counsel of California-based Lionsgate Entertainment Corp., was accused by a former in-house counsel of sexual harassment and misconduct in The Wall Street Journal report. Levin resigned last November amid the allegations, with a nine-page severance agreement, but he did not comment about the allegations in the media.
In another sign of the times, Gilmore said his recruiting firm is seeing a slight uptick in the number of companies seeking to hire a labor and employment in-house counsel with experience in implementing strong sexual harassment policies.
But weak policies and procedures are only part of the problem, according to some experts who also blame inequality in the workplace.
“It really doesn’t matter if it’s someone in the C-suite or someone in the maintenance department,” Minneapolis sexual harassment consultant Susan Strauss said. “You should be consistent in how you handle the issue.”
Different companies treat consensual in-house romances differently she said. “But most companies I deal with say someone in a position of power should not be in a romantic relationship with someone of less power. You risk the possibility of a sexual harassment claim.”
And anyone in the C-suite, Strauss said, should not date anyone else in the company “because they C-suite have the power, no matter what.”
Law professor Rachel Arnow-Richman, of the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, said there are larger problems in the labor market and employment law regime that go beyond sexual harassment. She specifically cited the $90 million severance package paid to one of the Google executives.
Arnow-Richman, who teaches labor and employment law and is director of the school’s Workplace Law Program, explained, “The country is focused right now on sexual impropriety, but there’s a more fundamental problem in the workplaces and in a labor market where executives have multimillion-dollar severance packages and we have a federal $7.25 minimum wage at the other end.”
The baseline problem, she said, is that workers are vulnerable to harassment because they can be demoted or transferred or fired at will, while executives are protected by contracts with huge severance packages.
She said some solutions, short of changing the U.S. labor system, might include limits on executive pay, and especially on severance pay.
Another would be to write contracts that encourage better behavior, she said, with clear authority to terminate an executive for sexual harassment or misconduct.
Read more:
Report: Alphabet CLO Drummond Secretly Fathered Child With Subordinate
With Google Accused of Protecting Men in Power, Company's Policies in the Spotlight
