O'Reilly Case Shows The Corporate Complicity in Workplace Abuse

I think we all already knew that Bill O’Reilly was a serial sexual predator. But what the latest revelations in the New York Times really reveal is just how complicit O’Reilly’s corporate masters were in enabling him. And other revelations over the last year indicate that Fox is typical of both public and private corporations in not just refusing to take sexual harassment seriously but also, in some cases, obviously willingly enabling it.

Just in the last few months, there have been stories of rampant sexual harassment and abuse at Uber, Sterling Jewelers, the Weinstein Company, as well as, of course Fox, which seems to have been a haven for predatory behavior. In all these cases, senior management was well aware of the issues surrounding a particular employee or employees and basically did nothing and, worse, even rewarded the individuals involved.

The Times story indicates that Fox not only renewed O’Reilly’s contract for four years but also gave him a $7 million raise just weeks after O’Reilly settled a suit with a Fox co-worker for $32 million. What’s worse for Fox is that Rupert Murdoch’s sons, Lachlan and James, who had taken over Fox after Roger Ailes was fired for sexual harassment, were well aware of the allegations against O’Reilly, if not the size of the settlement.

Those allegations included “repeated harassment, a nonconsensual sexual relationship and the sending of gay pornography and other sexually explicit material to her.” But that information was apparently not enough to persuade the brothers to cut O’Reilly loose. Instead, they made “a business calculation to stand by Mr. O’Reilly despite his most recent, and potentially most explosive, harassment dispute”.

That decision turned out to be flawed when the Times revealed five prior O’Reilly settlements which then threatened to scuttle the deal that Fox was in the process of making in the UK in order to get full control of the satellite company Sky. In hopes of saving the deal, the Murdochs fired O’Reilly. What the stories about Ailes and now O’Reilly reveal is that the Murdochs were well aware of the problems within Fox. Ailes himself had apparently used corporate money as part of his settlements. And that will become a corporate problem as the Sky deal is still under scrutiny by the UK government. If that deal is blocked because of the recidivist nature of the News Corporations’, now 21st Century Fox, transgressions, shareholder suits will fly.

But Fox is just indicative of just how far corporations will go to protect certain “high performing” employees. In light of the most recent revelations, with a multitude of women coming forward describing their harassment and assaults across a broad range of industries, it is becoming clear that men who know about these situations must speak up as well. Obviously, I can’t speak for everyone, but I would bet that the reason that so many men remain silent is that sexual harassment is part and parcel of generic workplace abuse as a whole, abuse that extends across gender. Don’t get me wrong, being forced to work unpaid overtime is nothing compared to being sexually assaulted. But the men, like the women, know that speaking up will only be putting their own jobs at risk.

Sexual harassment and abuse on the job is horrific and criminal. But we will never really put an end to it unless we tackle the more generic problem of the “cancerous corporate culture”, as Erik Loomis describes it, of workplace abuse.