Site details sexual harassment claims – and it’s planning to come to Canada soon
With a few clicks of the mouse, employers and employees alike can now find out if a manager or potential boss in the United States is facing, or has been convicted, of sexual harassment charges. eBossWatch, a website that allows people to anonymously rate their superiors, has launched a national sexual harassment registry and intends to introduce a Canadian version later this year.
Only eBossWatch, and not users, can post information to the sexual harassment registry, using press reports and court documents.
“We wanted to create a resource that would help people evaluate potential bosses, potential employers and managerial candidates,” said Asher Adelman, founder of eBossWatch in Las Vegas.
Even if 90 per cent of sexual harassment complaints filed are settled out of court, “we feel that people have the right to know about it,” he said.
However, this kind of site could lead to false allegations, said Roger McConchie, owner of McConchie Law in Vancouver which specializes in libel and privacy. While the registry is largely republishing public information, there can be the costly mistake of misidentifying people.
“You run the risk of a defamation complaint from other people with the same name who are getting smeared by the same brush,” he said.
Also, the Supreme Court of Canada recognized in 1995 there is a form of qualified privilege for reporting on the contents of court pleadings.
“You’ve got to be accurate and you can’t exceed the occasion and I’m not clear that principle would apply here,” said McConchie.
And while criminal complaints are scrutinized by authorities, “civil complaints are not subjected to that standard — anybody could file alleging sexual harassment without having it vetted by an objective counsellor in court and it worries me a bit that there’s scope for abuse here,” he said.
There are also a range of possible offences in sexual harassment, said McConchie, “from a pin-up in a private cubicle to making some off-colour remark all the way through to abuse of authority by engaging in intimate relations, so I’m a little nervous about a registry that purports to record the fact someone’s been charged.”
However, if the site is easy to use and reliable, it could be handy to do a quick overview to see if a potential boss is on there, said Jeff Abram, president of recruitment firm SearchWest in Vancouver.
“We don’t want to put any of our candidates in an opportunity that may be of jeopardy to them,” he said.
But oftentimes people are considered guilty without proof and, once people have made that determination, they are unlikely to follow up later to see who’s actually convicted or acquitted, said Abram.
All the information on the people has been taken from publicly available sources, whether those be court information or news media, so eBossWatch isn’t really creating any new content with this, said Adelman. And the site is updated, so if a person is exonerated, that information will be posted, he said.
“We’re basically collecting, concentrating, aggregating it, making it easier for people to access.”
It takes a lot of work to file a sexual harassment complaint and it can have a huge impact on the accuser’s career and reputation, so it’s a big decision for people to make, said Adelman.
“If somebody feels this strongly about having been harassed by somebody else, if they’re willing to take all those risks, go to court and be cross-examined and have their reputation questioned, we feel people have a right to know about it.”
Adelman launched the original site, eBossWatch, in June 2007, allowing people to rate or find ratings of bosses (similar to other sites such as rateyourjob-rateyourboss.com, boss rater.com and rateyours.com). eBossWatch users can also pay a premium for a more thorough background check.
The ratings at eBossWatch are done anonymously but a person can only rate a certain individual once since IP addresses are recorded. Of course, this means people might be able to rate themselves and that’s one of the limitations, said Adelman.
“eBossWatch wasn’t designed to be the sole tool to base a career decision on, it’s meant to be one aspect or one resource out of many to be used by jobseekers and by employers who want to review potential managerial candidates,” he said. “The more reviews submitted on each person, the more accurate they’re liable to be.”
However, the site has its drawbacks, according to McConchie.
“If I were an employer looking to rate my subordinates, this is the last kind of place I would look. The potential for abuse here is huge,” he said. “People who are disgruntled and angry and want to get back at their boss can go up anonymously and trash them.”
If the same boss is getting a bad review again and again, or has been charged for sexual harassment several times, it’s very useful, said Abram.
A site with boss ratings sounds interesting as long as current employees are separated from past employees, otherwise the ratings can be skewed, for example, by an employee who was put on a performance plan and eventually terminated, said Abram.
However, “anytime you can put something in anonymously, I think it has zero validation,” he said. “There’s great danger there. Both these things have the opportunity to be used as a very damaging tool or, of course, a helpful tool.”
The reviews consist of six opinion statements — such as “I feel like my boss cares about my career development” — so by law, they cannot be considered libelous, said Adelman. About three-quarters of the ratings are negative and while some people have said they will sue for slander and defamation, eBossWatch is not like other sites as people can’t rant or rave about their bosses.
“From the get-go, our goal was to have a professional and respectful and non-libelous and completely legal resource for people to use,” he said. “It would just be really difficult to police and to monitor free text comments.”
eBossWatch appears safe from defamation or libel as it does not allege someone is incompetent in their profession or trade or has conducted themselves badly by acting unethically or dishonestly, said McConchie.
“The people who are setting up this website deliberately made the decision to minimize their risk profile by not offering the scope for personal comment. It’s usually in that box that people have the opportunity to post vitriolic and often completely scandalous and outrageous accusations about people.”
However, employers should have someone monitoring websites like this so if something defamatory comes up about an employee, it’s caught and complained about, particularly in the sexual harassment section, said McConchie.
