By Steven Greenhouse
July 15, 2001
The federal government has sued the Giuliani administration, charging it with doing too little to protect women in workfare jobs from sexual and racial harassment by their supervisors.
In filing the lawsuit, Mary Jo White, the United States attorney in Manhattan, described incidents in which one supervisor turned out the office lights and told a workfare worker to pull down her pants, and another supervisor told a black workfare participant to pay little heed to a noose hanging inside a building she was painting.
The lawsuit accuses the city of subjecting four women in its Work Experience Program to a hostile work environment by not responding vigorously after they complained of sexual or racial harassment
Employment law experts said it was unusual for the federal government to accuse a city of not doing enough to stop sexual harassment. The lawsuit was filed with the approval of Attorney General John Ashcroft.
The government said it brought the lawsuit only after efforts at negotiating a settlement had failed. Marvin Smilon, a spokesman for Ms. White, declined to discuss the case.
City officials denied that the administration permitted widespread harassment in the workfare program. They noted that the lawsuit involved four cases out of 30,000 current workfare participants, and tens of thousands of others who had passed through the program.
Lorna Bade Goodman, a senior lawyer in the city corporation counsel’s office, said the city was not ready to deny or confirm allegations in the lawsuit, which the federal government filed quietly seven weeks ago. “We are doing as we do in any federal lawsuit,” she said. “We are talking to people and conducting our investigation of the allegations, and then we will decide how we will respond.”
In the past, the Giuliani administration has said that welfare recipients in the city’'s workfare program were not employees and had no legal right to protection from sexual discrimination or sexual harassment in the workplace. Ms. Goodman took a less hard-edged position, saying it was unclear whether federal employment laws against sexual discrimination protect the 30,000 people in city workfare jobs.
The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, seeks compensatory damages and an order for the city to correct the situation.
It charges sexual harassment against three welfare recipients who worked for their benefits, including Tammy Auer, a workfare participant in the Sanitation Department in Staten Island.
The lawsuit said that her superviser touched her improperly on several occasions and that he said they could have a beautiful baby together. The lawsuit said that when Ms. Auer complained to the Sanitation Department's borough commissioner, the city took no action.
The lawsuit also charges sexual harassment in the case of Ms. Gonzalez, who worked at the Human Resources Administration.
“My supervisor used to go behind me and blow on my neck and touch my arms,” she said in a telephone interview. “He would tell other workers I was a lesbian because I didn't want to have sex with him.”
Ms. Gonzalez said that the harassment continued for a year and that when she complained to her supervisor’s boss, he told her to work it out with her supervisor. She said that after complaining, she was transferred to a work site that was filthy and vermin-infested.
The third woman, the lawsuit claims, was told by her supervisor to pull down her pants.
The federal lawsuit also accuses the city of allowing a hostile racial environment for Theresa Caldwell-Benjamin, a black welfare recipient working for the Parks Department. According to the lawsuit, Ms. Caldwell-Benjamin saw racial caricatures and a noose hanging in a window when she was assigned to paint a two-story building in Staten Island.
The lawsuit said that she had complained to her supervisor, but that the supervisor had said other Parks Department employees “didn't mean anything by it.”