SEXUAL HARASSMENT

Accountability in Albany?

Local governments may finally be held responsible when elected officials commit sexual harassment.

By Zach Williams

ELECTED OFFICIALS IN all three branches of government might get clarification soon on who exactly they work for. A key step involves the Assembly Codes Committee, which passed the legislation on Feb. 15 that would close a legal loophole that exempts local and state governments from being responsible for sexual harassment committed by public officials. Past court rulings have held that they did not technically work for their city, county, town, village or the state Legislature.

The bill was a top priority for the Sexual Harassment Working Group, made up of former state Senate and Assembly staffers, as part of a package of six bills aimed at addressing misconduct by public officials. The bills have remained stuck in political limbo in the year after a litany of allegations against former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (who resigned in August as he faced impeachment for a range of alleged wrongdoing) highlighted the outstanding problem of sexual harassment in state government, but that could change if key bills are approved by the Legislature amid a wider push for ethics reform this year.

“For too long, our own state government has stood outside and largely above the law when it comes to sexual harassment,” Assembly Member Yuh-Line Niou, a former legislative staffer who is sponsoring the bill with state Sen. Andrew Gounardes, said in a text message. “This is a critical step towards ending the culture of impunity that has made Albany a toxic workplace for staffers and a source of shame in our mishandling of their sexual harassment complaints.”

Passage through the Codes Committee came two weeks after her bill was approved by the Governmental Operations Committee, where it died last year. This opened the way for the legislation to reach the Assembly floor in the coming days, where it could become the first of the six bills to pass the chamber. Exactly when that might happen remained unclear. “Once it gets out of committee, presumably it would go to the floor,” Codes Committee Chair Jeffrey Dinowitz told City & State. When asked about a timetable for passing the package, a spokesperson for Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie said, “There are bills moving through our committee process and being vetted by our members.”

Other legislation in the package backed by the working group would double the statute of limitations on workplace harassment from three years to six years, limit how nondisclosure agreements can be enforced and bar the use of “no-rehire clauses” in settlement agreements that prohibit the employee from seeking another job with their company. Another bill would require lobbyists to complete antisexual harassment training annually. A sixth bill would expand whistleblower protections for people who report abuse. The first four bills await votes by the full Senate while the final two bills remain in committee. A spokesperson for state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.

Legislative progress does not amount to real world change, however, until bills get through both houses of the state Legislature and signed into law by the governor. That happened in 2019 when the previously narrow legal definition of sexual harassment got changed after a blockbuster hearing by members of the state Senate and Assembly on sexual harassment in state government. “If you’ve got a scorecard looking at progress made in Albany over the last two years, then we deserve pretty high marks in comparison to the years before,” longtime state Sen. Liz Krueger said. Misconduct allegations against Cuomo renewed calls for additional reforms last year as former staffers and other women came forward. The state Senate passed the legislative package backed by the working group, with the exception of the whistleblower bill, on May 26. The same day, Heastie announced the formation of the Assembly Workgroup on Sexual Harassment. “There just doesn’t seem to be a sense of urgency around protecting workers,” Erica Vladimer, a co-founder of the Sexual Harassment Working Group, said in an interview.

The lack of progress in the Assembly came down to the bill not getting through the relevant committee before the legisla-

Assembly Member Yuh-Line Niou and state Sen. Andrew Gounardes sponsored a bill that would hold governments responsible for elected officials’ sexual harassment.

“There just doesn’t seem to be a sense of urgency around protecting workers.”

tive session ended in June. “There are any number of bills that passed in the Assembly that don’t pass in the Senate,” Assembly Judiciary Committee Chair Charles Lavine, whose committee held three of the bills that died last year, told City & State. “These are all good bills. They’re getting the consideration they deserve and I’m confident that they will be reported (to the full chamber).” Assembly Governmental Operations Chair Kenneth Zebrowski did not respond to a request for comment about why the lobbyist sexual harassment training bill and the legislation sponsored by Niou and Gounardes did not get through his committee last year. Assembly Governmental Employees Committee Chair Peter Abbate Jr. said most bills in his committee typically take two or more years to pass, which hampered the whistleblower bill last year. “I would say it wouldn’t pass before the budget,” he said of the bill’s prospects. While the legislative package appeared to be on hold for now, some progress against sexual harassment by public officials could be made through the state budget process. Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed replacing the much-criticized state Joint Commission on Public Ethics with a new state ethics body whose commissioners would be appointed by law school deans rather than the governor and legislative leaders. Good-government groups have backed the proposal despite some criticisms, and key lawmakers said including it in the budget would smooth its passage through both chambers. Success might even jump-start other legislative efforts to address harassment one year after misconduct allegations began accelerating Cuomo’s fall. “It’s hard to pass these huge bill packages,” Krueger said. “That’s why I think it’s valuable that the governor took a stab, even if an imperfect stab, at replacing JCOPE. … Democracy is a really imperfect model, (but) it’s just the one we’ve got.” ■

– Erica Vladimer, Sexual Harassment Working Group cofounder

A union on every corner

Starbucks baristas are leading a new wave of unionizations in unexpected places.

By Annie McDonough

WHEN BARISTAS AT two Starbucks stores in Buffalo voted to unionize late last year, the move left a ripple in the labor movement far greater than organizing a couple dozen employees. The Elmwood store was the first to unionize in the company’s 51-year history, but it won’t be the last. At least 60 other stores of the coffee chain in 19 states have announced union campaigns. The Starbucks unionization wave included two other stores in the Buffalo area that already had union votes underway by late last year – one voted to join the union, one voted against it. And earlier this month, employees at four stores in New York City and on Long Island – and several others upstate – filed petitions with the National Labor Relations Board to unionize with Workers United, the same affiliate of the Service Employees International Union that organized baristas in Buffalo. That chain reaction effect is exactly the kind of trend that the labor movement had hoped to see since union membership is down nationwide and efforts to give unionizing workers more protections through updates to federal labor New York is home to Starbucks employees’ law have stalled. In New York, where union membership has always been higher than the nationnew labor al average – 22.2% of wage and movement. salary workers in the state belong to unions, compared to 10.3% of workers nationwide – union membership saw only a slight uptick in 2021 from the previous year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Even that increase – from 22% in 2020 to 22.2% in