Office Holiday Parties Can Lead to Legal Hangovers
The atmosphere was thick with sexual innuendo at the company Christmas bash thrown at Techni-Craft Plating, a small jewelry-manufacturing firm in Cranston, R.I.
Employees swapped gag gifts, including a pack of condoms, black panties and T-shirts with suggestive slogans. Later on, employees said they played a game of strip poker--until a delivery driver unexpectedly showed up at the company’s door.
But after the bawdy laughter subsided, the gathering was transformed into a corporate nightmare: It emerged as important evidence in a tangled sexual harassment lawsuit brought against, and eventually lost by, Techni-Craft’s owner.
The traditional company party, normally intended to boost morale and pull the staff together, occasionally backfires. The worst tragedies involve workers who drive home drunk and wind up in deadly traffic accidents. But perhaps the most common and embarrassing hangover is the sexual harassment complaint that is triggered, or aggravated, by festivities that get out of hand.
Joel P. Kelly, a Los Angeles attorney who defends companies against sexual harassment and other employment-related lawsuits, put it wryly: “When I say Christmas is good for our business, this is what I mean.”
Legal experts say party-related sexual, as well as racial, harassment probably happens most often in such fields as sales, where after-hours socializing with clients and co-workers is routine. But law and stock brokerage firms also have courted trouble with their office soirees, be they to celebrate Christmas, July 4 or an employee’s birthday.
“The party atmosphere makes people do things that aren’t businesslike,” said Pamela J. Thomason, regional attorney in charge of the Los Angeles district office of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which investigates harassment claims. “They do stupid things.”
Rarely does the outrageous gesture or remark at a company social event provide the grounds in itself for a successful suit against an employer. What’s more, the massive rise in sexual harassment cases following the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas showdown in early 1991 has hit a plateau, as sophisticated employers have become increasingly sensitive to the problem. As part of the solution, some of these employers are toning down their company celebrations.
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Still, sexual harassment remains one of the biggest employment law issues in America. And the people who spur the suits often are bosses or co-workers whose actions were ignored--until, in the alleged victim’s mind, they crossed the line at the staff party.
It was essentially that way for Susan Siragusa. In June, she won a consent decree providing back pay and interest totaling $22,000 from a sexual harassment suit brought for her by the EEOC against a chain of auto tire shops in the Chicago area.
In Siragusa’s case, though, the offensive office Christmas celebration that contributed to her complaint was held just days after she joined the company as a clerk-secretary in December 1988.
Only 19 at the time, Siragusa went to the party, she said, after being encouraged to attend by her new co-workers, most of them men.
But she stormed out after learning, much to her surprise, that three female strippers had shown up. Even worse, Siragusa said, her store’s manager approached her the following Monday morning to tell her that one of the strippers performed sex acts after she left.
When things like that happen, she said, “you feel violated. I didn’t know if something went on by my desk. You have no idea.”
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Siragusa said she wanted to keep the job because of the good pay but that after four months of persistent harassment--allegedly including co-workers who pinched her, made obscene gestures and thrust pictures of nude women at her--she could no longer take the abuse and quit.
Employees shouldn’t “have to go through what I did. It shouldn’t be part of your job,” she said.
Along with those of employers, the reputations of politicians and other public figures have been badly tarnished by their alleged misbehavior at work-related parties.
Former Oregon Republican Sen. Bob Packwood, eventually driven out of office by charges of sexual harassment, was accused of fondling a teenage assistant’s buttocks at a political affair.
Tawdry, work-related partying also played a role, indirectly, in the sexual harassment case being brought by female employees against Mitsubishi Motor Manufacturing of America Inc. Lawyers for the women allege that the work environment at Mitsubishi’s Illinois plant was poisoned by such things as pictures passed around the factory of sex parties held by male employees.
A Mitsubishi spokeswoman said the company knows of only one instance when workers brought pornographic photos from a party into the plant and that the two employees responsible were quickly fired, along with a third who impeded management’s investigation. The company has also consistently denied responsibility for any sexual harassment at the plant.
Parties also figure in racial harassment or discrimination cases. One of the incidents cited in the recent Texaco racial discrimination controversy involved a birthday party for a black employee who had recently learned she was pregnant. Her colleagues gave her a birthday cake showing a pregnant woman with exaggerated features along with an inscription that read, “It must have been those watermelon seeds.”
A volatile mix of factors is involved at work-related parties. The influence of alcohol leads the way, even though many employers are doing such things as limiting free drinks, serving only beer and wine rather than hard liquor and shutting down bars early to give party-goers time to sober up before leaving.
Along with loosening sexual inhibitions, drinking also makes people more willing to insult each other in ways that contribute to racial discrimination complaints. “People get a couple of drinks in them, and that’s when you get the ‘you people’ type comments,” said Jaffe Dickerson, a management lawyer in Century City.
Gag gifts, a staple at many holiday get-togethers, can also mean trouble. Kelly said he had a client who thought he would get a laugh from a longtime female colleague by presenting her with a dildo at a company holiday party. Instead, the woman retaliated with a sexual harassment complaint, a case that quickly was settled after the firm agreed to provide sensitivity training to the staff.
What’s more, when sexual harassment occurs at a party, the target of the abuse usually has a stronger case. While many harassment cases fail because of a lack of witnesses, there likely are plenty of people around at an office party.
Plaintiffs also may be motivated to sue after an incident at a company party because “they’re being shamed in public now, not just in private,” said the EEOC’s Thomason.
There are no official figures indicating how often party misbehavior figures in sexual harassment and racial discrimination suits, but employment lawyers say the connection is routine.
All told, the EEOC reported that 15,342 sexual harassment charges were filed nationally with the agency and equivalent state and local agencies in fiscal 1996, down 1.3% from the peak year of 1995, but still up 2 1/2 times from 1990.
Party behavior can cut both ways in sexual harassment litigation, however. Sometimes the alleged harassers defend their actions by pointing to the accusers’ own conduct at social events.
In the unusual Techni-Craft case, one of the two plaintiffs--both men--found that his case was helped as well as hurt by what took place at the company’s infamous Christmas party in 1988.
The heart of the sexual harassment case was a charge by the two male employees, Gary Showalter and Nenh Phetosomphone, that their male boss pressured them to have sex with his female secretary.
In some respects, their case was bolstered by accounts of the company Christmas party, which provided evidence of the pervasiveness of the sexual harassment. During the gift exchange, for instance, the secretary gave away T-shirts with sexually suggestive slogans, the milder of which read: “All I Want Is a Little Peace and Quiet. Give Me a Little Piece and I’ll Be Quiet.”
But the federal judge handling the case found that Showalter willingly participated in the gift exchange and on several occasions made sexually explicit remarks to co-workers.
In the end, the suit probably was more humiliating than financially costly for Techni-Craft’s parent company. The plaintiffs proved sexual harassment but not the intentional infliction of emotional distress, which could have brought greater damages.
The judge ordered the company to take such preventive steps as designating an officer to handle future sexual-harassment complaints. In addition, Phetosomphone, who quit due to the harassment, was awarded back wages of just over $1,700, plus interest and some legal expenses. Showalter, who remained on the company’s payroll, received only nominal damages of $1 plus legal expenses.
Not all employers are alarmed about the occasional legal fallout from a company party that gets out of hand. A survey by the executive search firm Battalia Winston International of 102 large companies actually found that more are throwing holiday parties this year than last. Still, Dale Winston, who heads the firm, said many companies are switching to cash bars to keep drinking under control. Other firms invite employees’ spouses, and sometimes children, also with an eye toward encouraging restraint.
Warren Bobrow, a human resources consultant in the Boston area, considers some of the concern about party-related harassment overblown. He urges employers not to let their lawyers talk them out of holding celebrations that their staffers have enjoyed for years.
“My feeling is if you treat people like adults, they’ll behave like adults,” Bobrow said.
But David Sharp, a human resources manager for about 70 employees of Viatel Global Communications in Omaha, isn’t willing to take a laissez-faire approach. Shortly after arriving at the telecommunications company in October 1995, he ended its practice of providing free drinks at the annual holiday party.
The main reason, aside from the potential for traffic accidents, was that he remembered how employees at his previous company would behave after a few drinks: Too often, they’d wind up making comments that could be construed as sexual or racial harassment.
Moreover, Sharp said, much of his firm’s staff is young, and “when these people get together, there are no holds barred. I’d just as soon not place the company in jeopardy by paying for their alcohol and having them use a racial slur.
“I’m not very popular right now, but that’s OK.”
