Steve Easterbrook, who was the CEO of McDonald’s, was fired on Sunday after it was discovered that he was having a consensual relationship with a company employee. Easterbrook was fired days after Representative Katie Hill resigned from the US Congress, after being accused of having a relationship with a subordinate (which she denies) and a past relationship with a campaign staffer (which she admits to).
Details about both of the relationships and how they originated and how they were conducted remain scarce. But it looks bad, doesn’t it? We’ve seen it so many times, its almost a cliche: the CEO leering at the secretary, the congressperson crossing lines with staffers in anonymous hotel rooms and the powerful boss dangling the promise of a promotion in exchange for sex.
Given how widespread harassment at work is, these two cases must be signs of improvement, right? An indication that corporations and governments are finally taking a zero-tolerance approach to abuses of power? Right?
The problem is that in neither case is it entirely clear whether the other person in the relationship objected to its existence. In the wake of #MeToo, romantic relationships are increasingly discussed in the language of power, and a “power imbalance” between the participants in a relationship is almost uniformly understood as being bad. How power is defined in each case is a little more murky.
If someone is a direct supervisor, the power dynamic is pretty clear. But what about colleagues? Or a relationship with someone who has a more advanced position but does not directly control your employment status? Or at a university, what about a professor in one department in a relationship with a student over the age of consent in an entirely other department? What is the equation that will tell us how to add and subtract all the differing levels of power for every relationship?
A growing number of companies have decided to turn grays into blacks and whites with flat “no fraternization” policies. More than 75% of companies now forbid relationships between an employee and someone in their chain-of-command, but other companies are banning relationships of any kind between employees. And while companies use the language of protection – presenting themselves as benevolent figures only interested in the safety of their workers, who are like family to them, really – one can assume they are more interested in their own liability. Not to mention the fact that at least one company has tried to use their fraternization policies to prevent employees from gathering to discuss unionizing.
In the case of Easterbrook, McDonald’s has said his relationship “violat[ed] company policy”, but the specifics about that policy have not been released. Even without knowing the details, the conflation of romance with harassment is strange, given how more than 80% of people report meeting a romantic partner through work. And while there are issues with mixing business with pleasure – like this study titled Rejecting Unwanted Romantic Advances is More Difficult Than Suitors Realize which kind of says it all – it would be a better use of a company’s time to address the real cases of harassment in their workplaces rather than hope it all goes away with a strict ban on fraternization.
After all, how much power over our private lives do we want to give to our employers? In a corporate culture where your employer is free to fire you for social media posts made years before you were hired, for smoking legal marijuana or even cigarettes on your time off, for supporting the antifa movement, among other social behaviors, do we really want to allow employers’ even more power to monitor and restrict our behavior?
Whatever McDonald’s policy about romantic relationships is, it doesn’t seem to help the vast majority of its workforce. Last year, McDonald’s employees participated in a nationwide strike to protest the lack of company protection against sexual harassment in its franchises. Since then, dozens of women have filed lawsuits against the company for failure to act against harassment and retaliation. Women reported having their hours cut after turning down a manager’s advances, of facing violence and assault, and of being forced to work in environments of intimidation. According to a recent statement by Time’s Up, an organization that fights for fair work environments, McDonald’s still has not put in place policies that would protect workers and give clear guidance for someone trapped in a hostile work environment.
One in six female congressional staffers have reported being sexually harassed or retaliated against for rejecting advances, and while a new bill updating the sexual harassment policies for employees of the US Congress was recently passed, it lacked many basic protections, like legal representation for the accuser, nor does it guarantee that an independent investigation of the claims must take place.
Rather than regulating the interpersonal relationships of its employees, perhaps corporations would be better served developing and implementing real structural protections for its employees. Going after “problematic” relationships one by one only serves to improve the company’s image while doing nothing for the vast majority of the people in its care.
Jessa Crispin is the host of the Public Intellectual podcast and the author of Why I am Not a Feminist