Articles

25 Years After the ‘Boom Boom Room’ Lawsuit, Wall Street Still Has a Long Way to Go

Twenty-five years ago this month, three women at a Long Island branch of financial industry giant Smith Barney filed an explosive class-action sexual harassment lawsuit. Their complaint described a branch office where it was acceptable for men to refer to their female colleagues as “b*tches” and “c*nts”, where the boss bellowed to the troops at an office Christmas party that the branch was “the biggest whorehouse in Garden City” and where male brokers would assemble in a basement party room dubbed “the Boom Boom Room” to drink, party and engage in vulgar talk.

That suit wound up including 22,000 women by the time it settled, and women at other brokerage firms started speaking up, too, adding up to a public relations nightmare for the brokerage industry.

A quarter-century later, there is change, but women are still struggling. I wrote about it in an opinion piece today for CNN. You can read it here.

Arbitration Storm at DoorDash

In today’s forced arbitration world, plaintiffs’ lawyers can’t make any money on a $500 rip-off complaint from a single consumer or a one-off $1,000 wage and hour claim. Banning access to the courts for individual matters — while barring group claims even in arbitration — is a near-guarantee that sleazy operators won’t be held accountable.

Until now. Lawyers whose cases hit a dead-end when companies began banning class actions are using advertising, social media, and word-of-mouth among employees to track down plaintiffs and file mass arbitrations. That means that, these days, exploited employees with very similar cases can turn the arbitration game against employers. I wrote about one such case against the food delivery service DoorDash for The American Prospect. You can read it here.

 

Insurers grow wary of ‘high-risk’ executives in wake of #MeToo movement

A number of companies that sell liability insurance to cover sexual harassment are demanding higher deductibles or restricting coverage for businesses in high-risk industries such as entertainment, a new survey shows. I wrote about it today for CNBC.com.

A year ago, insurers were getting concerned about the risks they were taking on when they wrote these policies, but their anxiety has risen over the past year. This is the story I wrote about the 2018 survey for theintercept.com.

Stark Lessons from Wall Street’s #MeToo Moment

Women filed a wave of lawsuits and arbitrations against financial firms in the 1990s and early 2000s, disgusted by a culture of rampant sexual harassment and gender discrimination. The biggest cases of that era collectively drew thousands of participants in class actions and led to large settlements including $150 million against Smith Barney and $250 million against Merrill Lynch.

At a time when the long-term consequences of #MeToo on women’s careers is an open questions, I looked at court records, tracked down plaintiffs and spoke with a dozen employment lawyers to see how things had turned out for the women — and how things had turned out for the men who allegedly harassed them. My findings were sobering. You can read my story today for The Intercept here.

Wall Street Goes Silent on #MeToo

A woman who is sexually harassed at work is six and a half times more likely to change jobs than a woman who is not. So you might think that, a year and a half into the #MeToo movement, sexual harassment would be a front-burner issue for the people paid to diversity Wall Street.

Yet at a two-day conference of diversity experts in the securities industry in New York in late May, not one of the seven panels addressed the challenge of sexual harassment in the workplace. I wrote about it in my latest piece for The Intercept. You can read it here.