High Court to Focus on Sex Harassment
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court’s 1997-98 term could become a pivotal one for sexual-harassment law. The justices agreed Friday to tackle a fourth case on the subject, voting to review the lawsuit of a Chicago woman who says a supervisor linked her job success to sexual favors.
The justices said they will decide whether Kimberly Ellerth’s lawsuit against her former employer, Burlington Industries Inc., should get to a trial jury. Its decision, expected by late June, could offer important new guidelines for harassment disputes.
Lawyers for Burlington are urging the court to use Ellerth’s case to rule that employers are responsible for a supervisor’s threats only when an employee submits to the supervisor’s sexual advances or suffers some harm--firing, demotion or the like--for not submitting.
The justices already are studying a Florida case that focuses on sexual misconduct by supervisors. But that case involves an employee’s claim that she was subjected to an illegal “hostile environment.”
Ellerth’s case concerns another branch of sex-harassment law, known as “quid pro quo” harassment--situations in which job conditions are linked to sexual favors.
She was a merchandising assistant in Burlington’s mattress-fabric division from March 1993 to May 1994, when she resigned. Her lawsuit said she quit because she was harassed by Theodore Slowik, a New York-based vice president of sales and marketing in her division.
Slowik, in effect, supervised Ellerth’s supervisor, but he often traveled for business to Chicago, where he dealt with Ellerth regularly. Ellerth alleged that Slowik touched her inappropriately, told offensive jokes and made sexual innuendoes. She said he once told her, “You know, Kim, I could make your life very hard or very easy at Burlington.”
A federal trial judge threw out the lawsuit, but the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated it.
The nation’s highest court also is studying a Texas dispute over when school districts are legally responsible for teachers’ sexual misconduct. The justices are also to decide in a Louisiana case whether on-the-job harassment can be illegal when the harasser and victim are the same sex.
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