Over 17 long years — starting long before the #MeToo movement galvanized the nation — one of the most powerful banks in the country has been able to keep the lid on many embarrassing details of a high-profile under discrimination case. A day of reckoning could be on the horizon, though, with a recent agreement between Goldman Sachs and a group of women suing the firm in that case to unseal their allegations of harassment and discrimination. I wrote about the case today for Capital & Main.
Goldman Sachs & Co. is among the 50+ percent of U.S. companies that have forced employees into contracts that require them to use closed-door arbitration — not the public courts — in the event of a dispute. So-called “mandatory arbitration” is one of the greatest scams ever by Corporate America and helps keep racists, sexual harassers and other miscreant bosses out of the headlines and entrenched in their jobs.
So it shouldn’t have come as a huge surprise when, earlier this week, Goldman said it had hired a law firm to review the impact of mandatory arbitration on its employees and that arbitration was working just fine! Which indeed it is, for Goldman. What was a surprise was news that the law firm that did the review was the same one that sexual predatorJeffrey Epstein used. I wrote about it today in The American Prospect.
Wall Street firms have been rushing to making commitments to racial justice since the death of George Floyd, but how do the same firms behave when a Black employee comes forward to complain about racism? The answer is discouraging. Black people who complain have been ostracized, harassed, threatened and fired after speaking up. And when they have their cases heard in Wall Street’s private arbitration forum, they lose almost all of the time. I wrote about these issues in an article for The Nation, published today.
You can read it here.
#MeToo is getting expensive for the insurance companies who issue policies to errant companies. I wrote about it today in this piece for The Intercept.
Jay Clayton, Donald Trump’s choice to run the Securities and Exchange Commission, is a man Wall Street itself might have picked to run its most important federal regulator. Except for two years clerking for a federal judge after graduating law school, he has worked his entire adult life at Sullivan & Cromwell, an elite law firm based in downtown Manhattan that includes many of the country’s largest publicly traded companies as clients.
Enforcement cases and fines have gone down since Clayton was sworn in last May, and the SEC has given Wall Street and corporate America any number of gifts, including the easing of public company disclosure requirements that some experts consider key for investors looking to understand a company. My colleague Gary Rivlin and I wrote about Clayton’s SEC for The Intercept. You can read our story here.
Everybody loves a half-price sale, and if you’re a recruiter on Wall Street, there’s always a markdown on female employees.
But the revealing lawsuits that used to challenge this outrageous pay gap and economically hostile work environment to women are few and far between today — and that’s how Wall Street wants it. The country’s biggest banks have made it harder than ever for women with complaints of unequal pay or treatment to make their cases in a public forum.
Twenty-three women sued Smith Barney for sexual harassment and pay discrimination in an explosive class-action lawsuit filed 20 years ago this month. It became known as the “boom-boom room” suit, named after a basement party room at Smith Barney’s branch office in Garden City, N.Y. Nearly 2,000 women joined the case, exposing the sordid antics of Wall Street’s testosterone-driven culture.
Smith Barney paid $150 million in arbitration awards and settlements in the case, and it and other Wall Street firms rushed to set up anti-harassment training, employee hotlines and programs to recruit women.
Twenty years later, permanent change is less obvious.
“You may no longer have strippers coming for afternoon entertainment, but that doesn’t mean you are treated as an equal,” said Anne C. Vladeck of the New York employment law firm Vladeck, Raskin & Clark. “It’s not quite as blatant as what went on in the boom-boom room, but it’s still there in a way that makes it very hard for women to succeed. Companies on Wall Street are just not changing.”
You can read the full story I wrote for The New York Times here.
Did you hear the one about the stock promoter, the lawyer, three figurehead CEOs and seven auditing firm partners?
No, it isn’t a “walks into a bar” joke. It’s a case brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission last month against the players in a sham stock offering. The agency went after all the people involved in what it called “a massive scheme to create public shell companies through false registration statements.”
No big deal, right? The SEC is supposed to be going after bad guys, making them pay fines and lose privileges. But it tends to do a lot better in cases against no-name boiler room types like the ones in the January case than it does with players at powerful banks.
In my column for TheStreet this week, I discussed the contrast in enforcement results between cases against small players and cases against Wall Street’s elite.
In December, for example, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or Finra, brought cases against ten household name firms for flouting the rules that govern research analysts when their firms are pitching for initial public offering business. In its complaints against the firms, Finra described the actions of specific people who broke specific rules. But we never learned their names. Indeed they weren’t charged at all. You can read my column here.