Law Spurs a Boom in Harassment Training

After 21 years as a manager with Chuck E. Cheese pizza restaurants, Ed Porter knows sexual harassment when he sees it.

If a jilted lover continues to pursue an ex-girlfriend at work, for example, he knows “you have to go them and say, ‘You can’t do that here,’ ” he said. Responsible for 11 stores from Bell to Santa Maria, Porter has charge over as many as 500 employees, including his share of lovesick teenagers and adult Romeos.

Porter has gone through several rounds of training to learn to spot and stop sexual harassment. Still, he and 10 other managers spent an entire day recently in the windowless break room of the company’s Huntington Beach restaurant with a private consultant going over much of the same ground.

Under a new state law, companies with as few as 50 workers must train all supervisors in sexual harassment prevention techniques by Dec. 31 -- and then repeat that training every two years. Like many companies that operate in California, Chuck E. Cheese corporate parent CEC Entertainment Inc. is teaching higher-ranking employees such as Porter to provide that training to junior managers.

The law, a response to the persistently high number of sexual harassment claims filed in California, has spurred a boom in sexual harassment prevention training. It’s less clear whether the rules will produce better-mannered employees.

Nationally and in California, sexual harassment claims peaked in 1997, but the totals remain far higher than in the early 1990s. In 2003, the most recent year for which data are available, 3,844 employees, most of them women, complained about a co-worker or boss to the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing. Nationally, there were more than 13,000 complaints last year.

Outside the break room where Porter, 54, and the other managers nursed bottles of water and coffee in foam cups, toddlers squealed atop kiddie rides, including one featuring a singing Barney. Moms munched pizza and older kids drilled into rows of blinking pinball and video games.

Meanwhile, Porter and his colleagues -- each attired in the chain’s trademark garb of Hawaiian shirt and khaki pants -- watched training videos. In one clip, two actors playing lascivious waiters hit on a female colleague while she restocks the salad bar. In another, a sultry manager in a low-cut dress threatens a new hire that his career will suffer if he doesn’t share an after-work beer with her.

After each vignette, consultant Monica Ballard, of Santa Monica-based Parallax Education, grilled the group on why the behavior constituted harassment, how they as managers should intervene to stop and document it and whom at CEC’s headquarters they should notify.

After lunch, Ballard watched each manager conduct a mini-training session and made sure he or she passed a written test covering company protocols.

For Porter, the Huntington Beach session was old hat. He says he has known how to deal with sexual harassment “for years” and that all the managers who report to him have already been “trained and retrained at least five times.”

CEC Entertainment, with 450 restaurants in California and 48 other states, has long enforced a “zero tolerance” policy, said Sylvia Pierce, a human resources manager who flew from headquarters in Irving, Texas, for the Huntington Beach session.

Still, company executives, like those at many other companies, fear that an employee’s behavior could give rise to expensive harassment lawsuits and the possibility of multimillion-dollar payouts. Three years ago, for instance, a San Diego jury awarded six Ralphs Grocery Co. employees a record $30.6-million award in a harassment case. The women accused the chain of covering up years of abusive language and violent behavior toward them by a store director.

Lawyers and others who study workplace harassment say that focused attention to the problem dates from the 1991 confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in which Anita Hill testified that Thomas, who had been her boss at the agency, had made obscene and unwanted advances toward her.

Hill’s experience raised awareness and triggered a sharp rise in complaints by women fed up with bosses who fondled them, made offensive comments or demanded sex in return for promotions.

“We’d gotten calls for years, but after the Thomas hearings, women knew what harassment was,” recalled Melissa Josephson, equal opportunity director for Women Employed, a Chicago-based advocacy group for working women.

The Thomas hearings also gave rise to the laws directed explicitly at sexual harassment and prodded businesses to take the issue seriously as well.

One result, according to Richard Simmons, a Los Angeles lawyer who defends employers in harassment cases, is that “many people are now better behaved” at work.

Yet efforts to combat harassment seem to have brought only modest declines in the number of claims. Simmons finds one explanation in the “mixed signals we get from television,” including sexually provocative dialogue and dress. “Everything we’re taught on TV is exactly what will get you into trouble in the workplace,” he said.

Training also can also have a downside, Simmons said. Increased attention to harassment, he contends, also has generated a slew of unwarranted claims.

Employees disgruntled for other reasons now know that sexual harassment is a potent weapon against the company, said Robert M. Lee, who heads the Newport Beach-based Institute for Applied Management, which conducts workplace training.

“Many employees are looking for reasons to sue,” he said.

Simmons calls such complaints “legal extortion” -- meritless suits that often force an employer to pay the plaintiff something to make the case go away.

But Nancy Bornn, a Marina del Rey plaintiffs’ lawyer, disputes that such shakedowns are common.

“In my 20-plus years of doing this, I’ve only had one case where there was an ulterior motive for complaining,” she said. “The people who come to my office have generally gone through a lot to get here.”

Linda E. Meyer, a Malibu attorney who mediates harassment disputes, says many claims result from the different ways in which men and women communicate. If a man flirts with a woman in his office, she said, “he thinks he said something nice. How can that be harassment, he wonders?” But if that attention makes the woman uncomfortable, “she may feel she has to be pleasant to him because he’s her boss,” Meyer said.

By ensuring that managers can recognize harassment and know they must stop it, California’s new law may eventually help further reduce the number of lawsuits over workplace behavior.

Corporate executives hope the law, requiring them to document the training they provided, also will protect managers who take appropriate steps from blockbuster liability verdicts.

In the short run, however, the law’s precise requirements -- insisting on at least two hours of “interactive” training -- is likely to be a boon to consultants such as Ballard and lawyers such as Simmons who offer that instruction at rates that can range from $1,500 to $3,000 a day.

“Prevention is the best cure,” Simmons said.