Anti-discrimination worker claims she was fired for her sexual harassment claims

Carol Kline, a seven year veteran of the Utah Antidiscrimination and Labor Division, the state agency responsible for protecting workers' civil rights, claims that the agency fired her in retaliation for her filing of discrimination and sexual harassment claims against the agency. Between 1999 and 2003, Kline filed three complaints of discrimination and harassment along with several other women in the office. Each complaint was upheld by the EEOC.
The Utah Antidiscrimination and Labor Division claims that Kline was fired because her work was no longer up to standards and that "termination was the only way to go." What kind of upside down world do we live in when the agency that is supposedly protecting workers’ civil rights is itself accused of engaging in discriminatory practices? Such an agency, by virtue of its responsibilities, should have kept its practices so clean that no one could even think about bringing such allegations.
According to Kline, this agency didn’t. She alleges that her former supervisor, Harold Stephens, sexually harassed her. She said he directly made comments to her such as "Come sit on my lap and see what comes up," and, "You can fondle my files anytime."
Sounds like clear cut sexual harassment to me, right?
Stephens did not specifically acknowledge or deny making the alleged comments (read: I don’t want/can’t afford to lose my job or get sued for this right now), and he claims that he has his own sense of humor and that he essentially didn’t know what sexual harassment really was (read: not guilty by reason of stupidity).
While I do believe that a person (or an agency) should be considered innocent until proven guilty, the agency’s actions in this case are way too suspect for my liking. For one thing, it does not appear that there was any substantive investigation into Stephens’ comments, and as a result, no corrective action was taken. He was moved to a different department, while Kline was fired.
This seems to me to be a classic case of discriminatory retaliation where the agency’s tracks have been cleverly covered up. And such actions are not all that uncommon; after all, no employer will ever actually tell an employee that they are firing her in retaliation for her sexual harassment allegations.
Employers are much more clever when they engage in retaliation against employees who publicly and privately allege discrimination and harassment. To protect themselves from any liability and turn any case into a we said, she said case, an employer will likely set up a “troublesome” employee to fail.
The goal of setting up an employee to fail of course is to get them out of the company by making their life miserable. They usually accomplish this quickly and do so by presenting the department in which the employee works with unreasonable demands and unreasonable expectations. This done on a departmental basis, so as not to single out the employee and add credence to her claims.
Because employee reviews are usually kept confidential, retaliatory employers can single out the employee in private and manufacture evidence that she failed to effectively respond to their unreasonable demands (usually an unrealistic increase in output or productivity). They do this by giving everyone else in the department who was subject to the same demands and expectations good performance reviews (but not glowing reviews, so as not to attract attention), while giving the “problem” employee an unsatisfactory review. As a result, termination for poor performance becomes the only option— and the employer has the documentation to back it up.
Unfortunately, retaliation against employees who allege discrimination, harassment, and other offenses in the workplace is not all that uncommon. According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), in fiscal year 2004, the EEOC received 22,740 charges of retaliation discrimination. The commission resolved 24,751 retaliation charges in 2004 (more than were filed during the course of the fiscal year), and recovered more than $90 million in monetary benefits for charging parties and other aggrieved individuals (not including monetary benefits obtained through litigation).
Kline probably has a long and hard uphill battle ahead of her as she takes on the Utah Antidiscrimination and Labor Division. She acknowledges that she was placed on corrective action, meaning she needed guidance in writing and analyzing. But in previous corrective actions, she received successful ratings along with bonuses for productivity and achievement. Kline feels that the corrective action was the ultimate reason why she was forced out of her job.
"They set me up to fail. I didn't receive the mentoring I needed, I wasn't allowed to enroll in the training I needed and I had contradictory advice from several people," she said.
Sounds way too familiar.