1998 Supreme Court Decisions: Employer Liability
The first case (Faragher v. City of Boca Raton) involved female lifeguards who had been repeatedly harassed over several years with offensive touching and foul comments by their supervisors. The Supreme Court found their employer, the City of Boca Raton, liable for the misconduct of its supervisory employees, in part because it had failed to disseminate its policy against sexual harassment to beach employees. The Court found that Ms. Faragher had no complaint procedure to follow, and that she and others had been discouraged by a male lifeguard training captain from reporting further up the city's chain of command.
The second case (Burlington Industries, Inc. v. Ellerth) involved a woman who felt compelled to quit her job after enduring 15 months of boorish and offensive remarks, physical advances, and propositions by a middle-management executive. The Court agreed that the supervisor's conduct constituted actionable sexual harassment, and sent the case back to the lower court to decide whether the company could prove that it had a well-publicized sexual harassment policy against such conduct and that the employee unreasonably failed to take advantage of the policy.