[For Part 1, see here. This Part 2 is subject to adjustment as days go on. Some minor deviations from the "rules" I set out here, as I write in future blog entries, will be done at my discretion. Edit done between asterisks on 12/18/12. Also note (added 12/18/12): The term "medical media" refers to medical advertising/promotions, not to genuine medical academic publishing. Slight additional edit 12/26/12.]
Though some may have felt that my unfolding my CommonHealth story is painfully slow and indirect, I think I have been judicious and timely enough, given my own methodical criteria and, on the other hand, my heavy heart in doing this. And maybe it’s just slow enough for those who don’t want to see it at all.
Meanwhile, I should make clear something that might have been said earlier. As a general policy here, because we are dealing with a matter involving an allegation of some kind of harassment in August 2010, you need to know a few things.
I. A big limitation on revealing facts about a work relationship at issue
First, after considerable careful and sincere thought, I am going to say very little on the facts directly involved with my work relationship with the 23-year-old (at the time) woman, to whom I give the pseudonym “Georgia Bellamy,” with whom I worked densely on one account for about six weeks in 2010 (and with whom I more generally shared “time in the same office complex” for about four months). This relationship, of course, was the sine qua non for a broadcast advisory being made about me in August 2010, which in form was unprecedented in my experience (I’d never seen anything like this before) and in my opinion was highly unprofessional; and which as to the facts was quite uncalled for.
Georgia was technically acceptable, weak in interpersonal skills (in 2010)
Apart from the issue of harassment, though I feel that Georgia, who was hired as a new trafficker, did well enough with the clerical, tend-to-own-business side of her job—when it came to tending to details and other aspects of the clerical side of her job, she used her studently wit to get done what she had to, in a praiseworthy manner (I thought)—I have solidly felt her interpersonal skills were not what they could or should have been. The position she was in—because of how the account we were working on was handled by others above us—required a crack trafficker who was well familiarized with technical aspects of how media products are handled (such as editorial issues a trafficker would be expected to understand well); and such a crack trafficker should also have been strengthened by experience to handle the very unusual pressures with a minimum of untoward reactions, weird interpersonal tangles, etc.
In some ways I felt Georgia was quite immature for the role (which is more the fault of whoever hired her for the role than of Georgia), and in other ways I felt badly for Georgia, or had the grounds to, because while she was trying her best, the situation was unfair for the position she was in, even for someone more experienced than she. It was as if she had to skate in a rough-and-tumble roller rink and had never skated before, plus I had to be her ad hoc partner and work in coordination with her while I had her deficiencies to deal with, as well as the fact that, metaphorically speaking, and independent of our own wills, the floor was jumping around beneath us in a way not typical of roller rinks. *[Note: This account may be adjusted in the future in line with a project category I have announced, called Afterthoughts.]*
If I told many details of what happened between us in the brief but rather intense work relationship, it would reflect negatively on Georgia as well as, I suppose, on me. In fact, it might reflect more negatively on her than on me. (This could be considered plausible to the extent that she was 23 at the time, had been at CommonHealth for a few months, and had apparently very limited or no prior work experience in a high-pressure media environment. Meanwhile, I had been associated with CommonHealth over about nine years, had 20+ years of experience in various media, and 30+ years work experience in total.) (I will make a future blog entry with a short, pithy comment on the issue of arguable religious hypocrisy that impacted matters there in August 2010, emanating from a functional clique of coworkers I dealt with, which apparently did not include Georgia.)
Details of our interpersonal business to be kept confidential
Decency seems to call for me to keep this set of details confidential—and, in a sense, in my view, if this were in the midst of litigation, I would consider it “privileged” information, i.e., not subject to disclosure. You should note that this does tie my hands a bit in making my case here.
The reasons I make my side on this halfway public; evasions and mismanagement hamper addressing an issue involving an arguable civil rights violation
Further, I think that regardless of how much factual merit there was in what transpired between me and Georgia on which to base some complaint about harassment, the way management handled this was so very atrocious—in defiance of any business practices I’ve witnessed as well as the case law I’ve researched—that, obviously, (1) I have seen fit to make preliminary public talk about it on the Internet—because it reflects gross corporate mismanagement, and that of a type that peculiarly happens in this case to relate to production of medical-information media for consumers, and (2) I think the mismanagement can be addressed soundly enough without reference to much of the alleged “harassment” that might have gone on between me and Georgia.
Moreover, in making this statement at all, you could say I am conceding there was some problem between me and Georgia, leaving me to be the main one to receive the embarrassment (including at my own hand), while I keep her identity publicly hidden (she herself has taken pains to keep herself hidden, using fake names on Facebook in contravention of what I think its policy is, as well as having a sort of smokescreen at her LinkedIn page; by the way, it did not take a "stalker's skills" to discover all this).
Lastly, (3) because CommonHealth has chosen to be basically dishonest and evasive about this matter, innovative measures have to be taken. The option for me to just put my tail between my legs, quietly leave medical media for good, and never get a workplace-related “assault” on me addressed is not something I feel I should accept at this stage of my life, and certainly not to benefit former coworkers (other than Georgia) some of whom were so immature in the matter that they should be learning the hard, bitter lessons, not me. Further, because my discovering the defamatory claim (promulgated by a manager) about harassment occurred when I came in to do last work on a set of “product information” documents—FDA-required, consumer-directed media—that themselves were being mismanaged by management, the harassment issue is weirdly but tightly tied to an issue of how to properly handle of media that serve public health interests (for a more precise but still general description of this, see Part 1, subsection “Preface to later 2010 story,” fourth paragraph).
Managerial high-handedness, with all else, was grossly insulting regarding my long-term professionalism
My position here—which actually ties my hands in certain small ways—accords with a number of things:
It is consistent with my idea that, regardless of whom I work with in direct hands-on work at a media company, particularly when it is a young woman with whom some odd interpersonal issue arises, I feel I am quite capable (while sometimes enduring a lot of pain in the situation that I feel is not due me) of dealing with it responsibly, and very much object—as a general matter and regarding specific examples—to one or more others’ taking a high-handed, blatantly facts-ignoring approach to it under the guise of exercising “management.”
In such situations I’ve been in in the past, even where I have made some mistakes, I think I am well qualified to say (1) I can typically try to mitigate things well enough, given my decades of work experience, and especially when specific circumstances force me, in practical terms, to be the main one to have done this anyway, and (2) there can be, from the relevant company’s end, professionally delineated and/or decent, confidentiality-respecting, work-rights-respecting ways to which I can consent to dealing with this sort of thing, which were NOT AT ALL used in this August 2010 case.
II. Two dimensions along which to measure the weakness of harassment claims
There are two dimensions to understanding a “harassment” issue at work: general/legal and historical/anecdotal.
On the general/legal level: As I speak as a legal layman, (a) case law in New Jersey generally, and strongly, does not support findings in line with what can be called the precious prerogatives of young women (in this case, these were on the part of the manager involved, not of Georgia Bellamy). There is a fairly high bar to a finding of “sexual harassment” on which some legal recovery can be based. (b) Guidelines such as in a Nolo Press book (see below) show or imply that current standards mean that common sense, and the fact that everyone has rights, dictate recent judicial decisions on sexual harassment cases. Further, such decisions reflect that there should be respect in fact-finding for multiple viewpoints among the parties in an issue and the need to have direct evidence.
On the historical/anecdotal level: In my experience, at least half of the alleged-harassment cases I’ve been witness to or otherwise a party to have been red herrings, ludicrous on their face in some ways, or otherwise reflective of such cases being the product of a not entirely sane accuser. In one case, many years ago, a male who was a friend of mine alleged sexual harassment that, far from being factually accurate, was more embarrassing to me than anything else (and it resulted in no sanction or much of anything beyond his sensationalizing “complaint”); and this claim—I don’t even think it was terribly serious—came from a person who soon quit college, after having attended a number of colleges; was (long-term) a substance abuser (of heroin) in some level of crisis in the weeks within the claim was made; and possibly was involved in a larceny that occurred at our workplace, in a situation I’ve detailed elsewhere that had a number of puzzling features (and if he was the one guilty of the larceny, this spoke most vividly to what kind of sick state he was in).
In another case years later, a young woman who alleged some form of harassment not only complained about me but did some form of complaint about nearly every other male in our temporary-worker group for one “issue” or another, including two she usually chose as her allies in this bitterly-office-political group. In this and other ways, she was a vivid example of a mentally ill person—she also was substance-abusing (not as seriously as the male just noted) and was given to derailment of her own career (how she had left her previous workplace was alarmingly telling); and her complaints at the workplace we were at, on their face, made her fairly notorious—though her behavior did not bring management to fire her, because of management considerations of expediency in getting the monstrous project done.
In short, in very vivid examples I’ve seen (others were not so sensational, but were not terribly much more credible), “sexual harassment” is somewhat like Samuel Johnson’s calling (false) patriotism the refuge of the scoundrel: badly made claims of sexual harassment, to me, are the refuge of the work-world loser. Again, I do not say this with respect to “Georgia Bellamy,” but do so more generally with how CommonHealth managers grossly mishandled the 2010 situation.
Guidelines from a Nolo Press book (not my final word on legal parameters of this matter)
Here are some passages from the Nolo Press book Your Rights in the Workplace, sixth edition, by Barbara Kate Repa (Berkeley, Calif.: Nolo, 2002).
“Sexual harassment on the job is not about sex; it’s about unwanted, abusive behavior—usually repeated and often in the face of requests to cut it out” (p. 8/5). The standard isn’t protecting the rights and honor of women alone; discrimination could be against anyone, so the legal standard is more objective: “For a growing number of courts these days, the vantage point is common sense, the guiding premise that most workers, men and women, simply want to come to work and do their jobs” (italics added; p. 8/5).
First, in dealing on a practical level with a sexual harassment issue, a manager should “[i]nterview the people involved. Start by talking to the person who complained. Find out exactly what the employee’s concerns are. Get details: what was said or done, when, where[,] and who else was there. Take notes of your interviews. Then talk to any employees who are being accused of misconduct. Get details from them as well. Be sure to interview any witnesses who may have seen or heard any problematic conduct” (p. 11/6; italics added). This sounds as if you want to get as much fair evidence as possible. You don’t simply rely on the untested words of the accuser, or even rely on what you think you overheard the “harasser” say to the victim, when you don’t know all the relevant background details to what the exchange might have been. More fundamentally, it sounds as if both sides in an issue have rights, so both sides’ rights should be respected. One side’s rights should not be trampled in “respect for” the rights of the other—because when you do this, you are respecting nobody’s rights in the matter.
