Women are filing more harassment claims in the #MeToo era. They’re also facing more retaliation.

Jen was fired just before Christmas in 2017.

She had worked for a music venue for a few months when she learned that David, a musician who she alleges raped friends of hers, was an investor in the company (both of their names have been changed to protect anonymity).

“I only found that out because of his own big mouth,” she said. One night, not long after David had asked Jen to work with his band and she had told him why she didn’t want to do so, she began receiving texts from friends. “He was drunk and he was saying, ‘I basically own that venue and this bitch is working there. I’ll get her fired.’”

Concerned he would follow through on the threat, Jen told her boss about the allegations against David. Her boss thanked her, and two days later, he and two other members of management held a formal meeting with her, where they told her they were going to bring it up to their lawyers. Even though they warned her that getting him out of the company would be “quite a process,” she respected them for making the attempt.

Then everything changed for her at work.

“The moment I brought it up, it was as if the world flipped,” said Jen. “I cannot believe how uncomfortable it was. If I walked in a minute late, [my boss] would say, ‘You’re late.’ I knew I was going to get fired.”

Sure enough, the next week, Jen was let go. In order to receive her last paycheck of around $900, she was forced to sign a nondisclosure agreement.

In that final meeting with her boss, Jen asked if her dismissal had anything to do with their prior conversations about David. He insisted it did not.

“It happened so fast,” she said. “It was only a week from, ‘Hey, there’s a problem,’ to, ‘Now you’re the problem.’”

Were we able to draw up a balance sheet for all the accusations of sexual violence that have come out throughout the #MeToo movement, it would include several big success stories. Harvey Weinstein, once so powerful in the entertainment industry, no longer has immunity to prey on people. Leslie Moonves, the former chair and CEO of CBS, was ousted from the company after allegations of sexual misconduct and retaliation.

It’s not just happening in Hollywood or the media. Numbers released by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal agency responsible for enforcing civil rights laws against gender, race, religious, and other forms of workplace discrimination, show that even as the overall number of complaints received is down 9.3 percent from 2017, complaints about sexual harassment rose 13.6 percent over the previous year.

“We’ve seen more people, mostly women but not exclusively women, willing to speak up,” said Victoria Lipnic, the agency’s acting chair. The numbers show that despite the obstacles to reporting harassment, more people are doing it.

It’s a useful, if imperfect, marker for measuring the magnitude of #MeToo. If that many more people made it to an EEOC filing, it’s reasonable to imagine that complaints registered elsewhere, whether at a state or local agency or internally with an employer, rose as well.

“Since we started in January 2018, we’ve had over 4,000 people reach out to us for help,” said Sharyn Tejani, director of the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, which offers assistance to individuals facing workplace sexual harassment. Tejani said two-thirds of those who have reached out identify themselves as low-wage workers.

But if there are more people speaking up, there may be more people than ever being fired for doing so. It’s hard to quantify the number of people who face retaliation like Jen did — she never filed a complaint with a government agency, and her NDA silences her. But retaliation remains the most frequent charge filed with the EEOC, and three-quarters of sexual harassment charges filed with the commission include a charge of retaliation.

The data shows that #MeToo has raised many women’s expectations and increased their willingness to seek some semblance of justice in the face of harassment. But it’s not clear what’s happening to these women after they report. If speaking out against harassment isn’t paired with more power in the workplace, outcomes like what happened to Jen are all but inevitable.

“The number of retaliation charges has been climbing,” said Lipnic of the EEOC’s numbers, calling retaliation “the next frontier in terms of what we need to deal with on the harassment front.” The commission’s 2016 report on workplace sexual harassment emphasizes retooled trainings and the role of cultural change in curbing this behavior. But such efforts can only go so far without redistribution of power toward employees.

“You can know you have rights, and know you’re being harassed, but if you have no power on the job to do anything about it, it really makes no difference,” said Saru Jayaraman, director of Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United, a workers center that advocates for improved wages and working conditions for the restaurant workforce. Although the restaurant industry employs just 7 percent of US workers, it accounts for more than a third of EEOC sexual harassment charges. “Getting millions of women to come forward and say, ‘I’m being harassed’ isn’t necessarily the solution,” said Jayaraman. “We want the harassment to stop in the first place and our research shows the best way for it to stop in the first place is to give women the power.”

For ROC, addressing that power imbalance means, first, ending the sub-minimum wage. In most states, restaurants can pay tipped workers below the minimum wage. ROC has found that in the seven states with a flat minimum wage, rates of harassment in the restaurant industry are half as high as in those without one. That’s because reliance on tips pressures workers to put up with anything from customers, fueling harassment and a sense of subordination in the workplace. Thanks in part to #MeToo, more states have since introduced such bills. “The biggest effect was helping us move policy on the issue, which I think is as it should be,” she said.

Yet even in-demand workers in highly paid jobs face retaliation for speaking up. Take the unfolding case of Meredith Whittaker and Claire Stapleton. Both women helped organize the 20,000-worker walkout at Google in protest of mandatory arbitration clauses in the company’s contracts — the use of such clauses in settling sexual harassment claims has received widespread criticism since #MeToo. Whittaker and Stapleton now allege that Google has retaliated against them for their efforts, with their work roles diminished after the walkout—recently, they filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the National Labor Relations Board.

This question of how to build the workplace power needed to address sexual harassment is all the more pressing in the wake of the Supreme Court’s May 2018 Epic Systems Corp. v Lewis ruling, which allows employers to bar workers from filing class-action lawsuits, channeling workplace grievances instead into mandatory arbitration, the very process against which Googlers revolted. Class-action lawsuits have been a major tool for those fighting workplace sexual harassment.

There has been promising legislation to fight back, such as state-level bans on the use of NDAs in agreements to settle sexual harassment claims. These are positive steps, though some of these bills have yet to pass into law.

But these laws need strong enforcement mechanisms. After all, retaliation is already illegal, but employers in low-wage industries know they can get away with it, so it continues. And with the EEOC itself headed for a pro-business makeover, employees need to take enforcement into their own hands — which is what a union can be: workers, collectively, enforcing their rights and pushing for more.

“The EEOC may help, but it’s not the solution,” said Jane McAlevey, a labor organizer and author of No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age. “Women need mechanisms in their workplaces to address the question of sexual harassment head on, and culture change isn’t going to happen unless there’s organizational might and power and heft — which is called a union — for women to force internal organizational change.”

As an example of what a union can achieve, McAlevey mentioned Unite Here’s “Hands Off, Pants On” campaign, which pushed Chicago City Council to pass an ordinance mandating that all hotel housekeepers, and anyone who works alone in a guest’s room, be given a panic button, with costs for implementation paid for by employers. The ordinance has inspired other cities to follow suit.

While there are plenty of examples of unions failing to take sexual harassment seriously, they are still the best vehicle for acting collectively in the workplace, whether to enforce existing policies or to craft new ones. Without them as a means for overcoming the hurdles to acting individually, not to mention the educational and mobilizing effects that come from politicizing sexual harassment, retaliation will simply carry on.

Speaking up publicly is intrinsic to #MeToo: It’s right there in the name. But even if you can get anyone to listen — many can’t — public opinion is fickle, and it’s full of rubberneckers. Adjudicating sexual violence requires time, and accountability and transparency among all involved parties. Plus, most women will not speak up regardless — many do not even know that what they experience in the workplace is harassment, much less that it’s illegal.

And whether or not the past year has led to cultural change, one thing hasn’t changed: For working-class people, speaking out still means risking their job. Reducing harassment requires reducing inequality, and though harassment happens in every sphere of life, it’s particularly pressing at the site we cannot opt out of: the workplace. It’s there that the potential for exercising collective power exists, separate from the authority of the employer.

Or, as Jen told me, most people she worked with had already known about allegations against David, but no one knew what to do about it. So when the choice was left up to her bosses, the outcome was no surprise. “I think I was believed, but I don’t think that mattered. Ultimately, their money mattered more.”

Alex Press is an assistant editor at Jacobin. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Nation, and n+1, among other places. Find her on Twitter @alexnpress.

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