Accusing DSK of Sexual Assault Took Guts -- But Union Protection Is Essential

http://www.alternet.org/news/151022/accusing_dsk_of_sexual_assault_took_guts_--_but_union_protection_is_essential/

By Adele M. Stan

A woman attacked by her employer's very powerful customer was perhaps empowered to come forward knowing her union contract meant she wouldn't lose her job for it.

May 19, 2011

In ancient times we had fables, myths and parables to explain to us the vicissitudes of nature and the nature of power, stories drawn to illuminate a given culture's moral code. Today we have the news media.

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As a morality tale about abuse of power, and the abuses of the powerful, the fall from grace of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former chief of the International Monetary Fund, is a doozy. Arrested last week for allegedly assaulting and forcing sex on a housekeeper at a luxury hotel in New York, a man who once ranked among the world's most powerful now sits, forlorn, in a jail cell on Rikers Island -- all because an immigrant woman in a lowly position had the temerity to tell a superior that one of her employer's very important clients had done, by her account, terrible things to her.

By any measure, it was a risky thing to do. There's a reason most rapes go unreported. But there was one thing that housekeeper knew could not be done to her for reporting her account, observes a colleague in the labor movement: she could not be fired for having done so, because of the contract between her union, the New York Hotel Trades Council, and the Sofitel Hotel at which she works.

Taken at its most literal level, the story of Strauss-Kahn's fall is rife with the iconography of a power dynamic described in texts going back to ancient times: the ravaging of female household staff by the master of the house. (It is not for nothing that a beloved sexual-fantasy meme for legions of ordinary men who seek sexual power involves a scantily-clad woman sporting a tiny apron, feather duster in hand.) Strauss-Kahn, as head of an international institution that can make or break entire nations, is the perfect modern stand-in for the role of an ancient king -- or even a creature of greater stature. ABC News referred to Strauss-Kahn as a "titan," referring to a member of the original pantheon of ancient Greek gods. (Were this simply a story about the alleged rape of a working-class woman of another profession by rich man who did not hold the fate of nations in his hands, it would not be nearly so riveting.)

FULL 2 page story at link.

My local filed a harassment charge against a female employee last year. The guy was glad we stuck up for him against a much higher seniority worker.

Go union!