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U.K. Parliament Workers Face ‘Unacceptable’ Abuse, Report Says U.K. Parliament Workers Face ‘Unacceptable’ Abuse, Report Says
(about 8 hours later)
LONDON — A blistering report on the House of Commons in Britain said on Thursday that people working for members of Parliament faced “an unacceptable risk of bullying and harassment” but often remained silent because complaining, even under a new grievance procedure, amounted to “career suicide.” LONDON — Lawmakers hurling heavy pieces of office equipment at aides, groping their breasts and slapping their backsides. Sexual harassment as a “necessary evil” for young staffers. Aides ordered to vacuum and tidy up their bosses’ apartments for private parties.
The investigation, led by Gemma White, a lawyer, called for “a fundamental shift away from regarding members of Parliament as ‘650 small businesses’ with near complete freedom to operate in relation to their staff.” Those accusations, contained in a blistering report on Britain’s Parliament released on Thursday, offered lurid details and descriptions of rampant rule breaking in a picture of the working lives of 3,200 staff members in the House of Commons.
In the report, people working for lawmakers said their tenure was almost unbearable, with one employee describing it as “the most stressful and hostile period of my life.” Another said that sexual harassment was “a necessary evil” for young, ambitious workers. Ordered up in October, as British officials picked through an avalanche of stories about misbehavior in Parliament amid the #MeToo movement, the report and a twin released a day before about the House of Lords, describe a universe in which lawmakers wielded virtually absolute power, and the rules and practices of the outside world had little relevance.
The study said that instances of sexual harassment were “often accompanied by touching, sometimes forceful.” The complaints came not just from “bright-eyed young graduates coming to Parliament to live the ‘dream’ and having high expectations shattered,” the report said, but from workers with prior experience in private business. Because they directly employ their aides, lawmakers have long been virtually immune to charges of sexual harassment or bullying and most other oversight. They openly recruit friends and relatives, discriminate in their hires, and force aides to campaign during what is supposed to be government time, the report said.
The findings lifted the lid on the sometime punishing hallways of Parliament, where staff members work directly for lawmakers with scant oversight. Those surveyed said they were sometimes left helpless and in tears because of chronic mistreatment. Parliamentary leaders have made some changes in the last year, creating a more explicit code of conduct and supposedly independent channels for filing complaints. But those changes were criticized in the report as underfunded, widely ignored in Parliament and too feeble to rein in lawmakers.
Almost immediately, the leader of the House of Commons, Mel Stride, announced that lawmakers would be asked next week to approve one of the changes recommended in the report: allowing former staff members, in addition to current ones, to file complaints. Far too easily, according to the report, career-making jobs in the seat of government can turn into experiences out of television shows like “Veep” or its British predecessor, “The Thick of It,” which satirize lawmakers’ cruel, unhinged antics.
But the report said the entire system of lawmakers’ teams operating as fiefs needed to be overhauled. Or much, much worse.
The House of Commons Commission, which is responsible for the administration and services of the chamber, said in a statement that it took “very seriously its responsibility to ensure that Parliament is a modern workplace,” even though the staff members interviewed for the report worked directly for lawmakers. The report, written by Gemma White, a lawyer, quoted one Parliamentary aide saying: “I don’t think of myself as a particularly soft individual, but there were occasions I found myself crying on the way to work, the only time I have cried since I was a child.”
“We condemn bullying and harassment of M.P.s’ staff and offer our full support to anyone in the parliamentary community who has suffered in this way,” the statement said. Many aides, the report said, spiraled into “significant mental and/or physical illness.”
The revelations in the inquiry mirrored those in a separate report a day earlier about the House of Lords, the upper house of Parliament, whose members are largely appointed. “One contributor described being sick every day on the way to work, crossing the road thinking if they were run over they would not need to go in to work,” the report said.
That report described a culture of bullying and harassment that had taken hold in an ossified workplace, where white men held many of the most senior staff posts and victims widely believed that complaining would only do them harm. And while the report did not name any offenders or go into detail about the most alarming accusations, it said it had uncovered behavior by lawmakers “which can only be described as very serious sexual assault.”
One member of the House of Lords took to grabbing the backside of a female clerk while he passed through the crowded lobby where lawmakers vote, the report said. So pervasive was misconduct that staff members avoided being in rooms alone with one lawmaker — “a notorious bullying pervert” — or even rearranged the office furniture so another “would stop leaning over to look down your shirt.” A new grievance process was introduced last summer, but filing a complaint still amounted to “career suicide,” aides told Ms. White. She outlined a series of recommendations for that process, including opening the door to old complaints. Some Parliamentary aides on the verge of quitting had recently been told that the only way to get a complaint heard was to stay in their jobs.
Twenty percent of staff members said that they had been bullied or harassed at work within the last year, the report on the House of Lords said. The fact that so many staff members work their entire careers in the Lords, resigned to low pay and fearful of their superiors, has frozen the institution in its old ways, the report said. Ms. White said true change required a complete overhaul of the system of lawmakers’ teams operating as fiefs. Ms. White stopped short of suggesting that hiring decisions be wrenched away from lawmakers altogether, but she said a centralized personnel department was needed to regulate everything from recruitment to on-the-job treatment.
“Staff can become institutionalized, bad habits can become entrenched, poor behavior can go unchecked, urban myths can develop and beliefs which may once have been justified can survive and flourish when no longer warranted,” the report said. “There must be a fundamental shift away from accepting that MPs’ offices are 650 individual businesses with near complete freedom to operate,” the report said.
Both inquiries were commissioned in the aftermath of a scathing report in October on the House of Commons that said complaints of mistreatment there were typically muffled by “deference, subservience, acquiescence and silence.” Piecemeal changes have already been slow to take hold. Only 34 of Britain’s 650 members of Parliament had attended or booked places for a training about the new code of conduct.
Complaints about harassment in the British Parliament have dribbled out for years, but the dam broke following accusations of sexual misconduct by the Hollywood power broker Harvey Weinstein. Responding to the report, the leader of the House of Commons, Mel Stride, told lawmakers that the government would ask them to vote to allow old complaints to be considered under the new grievance process.
Inspired by the #MeToo movement, women working in Parliament made allegations that ranged from unwanted touching and sexual remarks to kissing and groping. Introduced last summer, it created a venue for complaints to be independently investigated, but aides expressed concern that lawmakers remained involved and that only accusations since June 2017 could be considered.
Around a dozen lawmakers came under investigation. The first secretary of state, Damian Green, a close ally of Prime Minister Theresa May, was found to have breached the ministerial code of conduct and was forced to resign after an investigation found that he misled the public about pornography found on his parliamentary computer. “Our Parliament must be a safe place, free of bullying and harassment, and I am determined to play my part in delivering that,” Mr. Stride said in the House of Commons.
The problem owed in part to the apparent view of lawmakers that they were above workplace oversight. Employees had no independent personnel body to complain to. Instead, they were sent to the party whips, political enforcers who were said to stockpile the complaints to use as leverage against lawmakers in future votes. The House of Commons Commission, which is responsible for the administration of the chamber, said in a statement that it took “very seriously its responsibility to ensure that Parliament is a modern workplace,” even though it noted that staff members interviewed for the report worked directly for lawmakers.
The new grievance procedure, introduced last summer, drew up specific rules about behavior in Parliament and created independent help lines for reporting abuse. But a review released in May found that, while the system was an achievement, “the amount of work and procedural complexity to effectively implement and operate the scheme was substantially underestimated.” Many aides with complaints told the inquiry that other lawmakers had treated them better, and some said they understood their bosses were under intense pressure.
But the complaints were serious. They ranged from physical abuse by lawmakers — “breasts being grabbed, buttocks being slapped, thighs being stroked and crotches being pressed/rubbed against bodies,” the report said — to racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic invective.
And complaints came not just from “bright-eyed young graduates coming to Parliament to live the ‘dream’ and having high expectations shattered,” the report said, but from workers with prior experience in private business.
Lines between work and personal life were obliterated. One lawmaker berated a staff member for not immediately responding to off-hours emails, even going so far as to contact the aide during a visit to a dying relative.
Other lawmakers made “unfavorable comments” about employees’ homosexuality, talked in front of women about their bodies, and shared graphic details about problems in their own sex lives.
In the Parliamentary bars, which have long been alcohol-fueled incubators of predatory behavior, senior aides tried to trade sex with younger staff members, including many men, for career help. One aide said enduring sexual harassment was a “necessary evil” for ambitious employees without connections.
Being publicly humiliated was part of the job. But lawmakers also took advantage of private moments with their aides. In the most serious instances of abuse, the report said, aides often found themselves alone with lawmakers in a car, hotel room or home.
“Many contributors displayed clear symptoms of illness and/or distress when they came to see me,” Ms. White said. Her inquiry included testimony from more than 220 people, collected since November.
Soon after accusations of sexual misconduct by Harvey Weinstein became public, the dam broke open on complaints within Parliament. The first secretary of state, Damian Green, a close ally of Prime Minister Theresa May, was forced to resign. He was found to have misled the public about pornography found on his parliamentary computer.
But some powerful men in Britain have been shielded from the heat of the accusations by strict libel laws that set a high bar for publicly reporting sexual misconduct.
The report issued on Wednesday about the House of Lords, the upper house of Parliament, described an ossified workplace where white men held many of the most senior staff posts.
One member of the House of Lords took to grabbing the backside of a female clerk while he passed through the crowded lobby where lawmakers vote, that report said. So pervasive was misconduct that staff members avoided being in rooms alone with one lawmaker — “a notorious bullying pervert” — or even rearranged the office furniture so another “would stop leaning over to look down your shirt.”
The members of the House of Lords are largely appointed; it sees itself as the more genteel of the chambers.
Before last year, the only way an aide in the House of Commons could file a complaint, beyond appealing directly to their boss, was to bring a problem to the party whips, in-house enforcers whose job it is to persuade lawmakers to vote as the party leadership wants.
But, as has long been rumored and Ms. White’s report also documented, the accusations rarely went anywhere. Instead, aides said the enforcers saw their complaints as a chance to extract the desired votes from lawmakers — “logging ammunition for future whipping,” as one aide put it.
Sometimes, the abuse felt to aides like part of a game, the only escape being a breakdown.
One lawmaker, a staff member told Ms. White, treated them “like a cat playing with a mouse, disappointed when it dies.”