In February of last year, before the #MeToo movement had ignited a national focus on workplace sexual harassment, Rep. Barbara Comstock voted to eliminate safeguards that protected hundreds of thousands of federal contractors against sexual harassment.
Comstock voted to repeal a rule that required companies that bid for significant federal contracts to disclose labor violations – including sexual harassment. Even more shockingly, Comstock’s vote once again allowed federal contractors to force workers with harassment complaints into secret arbitration processes – the exact type of process that she has said she wants to ban in Congress.
Comstock’s Northern Virginia district is home to many federal contractors and their employees. Last year, contractors in the district received 5,710 federal contracts over $500,000 that would be covered under this rule.
“Rep. Barbara Comstock should be ashamed of paying lip service to victims of sexual harassment after using her authority to silence them,” said DCCC Communications Director Meredith Kelly. “When the cameras were on, Barbara Comstock said the right thing in criticizing famous TV hosts and politicians, but when no one was looking, Barbara Comstock voted to deny victims of harassment the very protections and open process that she herself has said they deserve.”
“Barbara Comstock must explain why federal workers in her district don’t deserve the same critical standard of protection as everyone else,” Kelly concluded.
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Politico: The sexual harassment vote the GOP would like to forget
January 2, 2018
By Ian Kullgren
Not long before a deluge of sexual harassment claims engulfed Capitol Hill, congressional Republicans and President Donald Trump quietly repealed safeguards to protect hundreds of thousands of American workers from such harassment.
Their target was an August 2016 regulation issued by the Obama Labor Department that required businesses to disclose certain labor violations — including sexual harassment — whenever they bid on large federal contracts.
The vote last year is especially relevant now that Congress, under immense public pressure, is weighing legislation to outlaw the very same secrecy agreements that it voted to keep legal less than a year ago.
The regulation in question was one of 14 reversed by congressional resolutions that Trump signed into law last year as part of his much-touted war against “job-killing regulations.” Besides requiring disclosure, the rule forbade the biggest federal contractors from forcing workers to take their grievances to arbitration, where employees are likelier to lose, than in the courts; in addition, the private proceedings are typically kept secret.
Mandatory arbitration clauses played a key role in keeping secret the sexual harassment settlements that piled up over decades at Fox News and elsewhere. Gretchen Carlson, who in 2016 settled a sexual harassment complaint against the late Fox News chairman Roger Ailes for a reported $20 million, has made the elimination of mandatory arbitration clauses the centerpiece of a campaign against sexual harassment.
“Certainly it leaves a lot of workers vulnerable to sexual harassment, because they have lost an essential tool to challenge sexual harassment,” said Thea Lee, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. “Imagine yourself in that situation. If you’re a woman who’s in a job and experiencing unwanted sexual harassment, you no longer have the ability to sue, because you gave that away.”
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Government contract employees are more vulnerable to sexual harassment than other employees, worker advocates say. That’s partly because they’re much likelier than other private-sector employees to switch work sites every few weeks or months, making it more difficult for them to develop a support network among coworkers. A 2016 EEOC report on sexual harassment found that victims typically told trusted colleagues and friends before they took any formal action. Even then, most never filed a complaint.
By far, the largest share of federal contracting dollars — 62 percent — pays for defense; the Pentagon spends more money on contractors than all other federal agencies combined. A 2009 change spearheaded by Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) — himself the target of sexual harassment allegations that prompted him to resign from Congress — bars defense contractors from imposing mandatory arbitration for sexual harassment claims.
But defense contract employees, experts say, remain especially vulnerable to sexual harassment. The frequent presence of classified information at the work site can make it difficult, and sometimes impossible, for private attorneys to gather even the most basic documentary evidence to support a client’s allegations.
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The Government Accountability Office has periodically investigated workplace violations among federal contractors, and discovered they are frequent. In 1995, GAO found that the government awarded $23 billion in contract dollars to companies that violated that National Labor Relations Act, the law that governs union organizing. A year later, GAO found that the government awarded $38 billion in contract dollars to companies fined by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. In 2010, GAO identified 20 federal contractors that owed $80 million in back wages to workers.
These statistics caught the attention of then-Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who chaired the Senate HELP Committee, which oversees labor issues. In 2013, he directed his staff to compile a report on federal contractors that violated federal law.
“What we had in mind was to make federal contracts basically the same as the federal government,” said Harkin, who left Congress in 2015. “To make sure when violations occur, especially workplace safety, they be disclosed.” Obama’s 2014 executive order, which required applicants for federal contracts exceeding $500,000 to disclose workplace violations during the previous three years, followed up on those efforts. The violations listed included Title VII, the portion of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex.
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