Says harassment claims ignored due to workfare status

July 18, 2001
Katia Hetter

Tonja McGhee claims that her supervisor at a city housing project started sexually harassing her more than two years ago, after she told him she didn't want to date him any more.

McGhee filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the city and the city Housing Authority in state court last week, claiming housing officials failed to enforce city and state sex discrimination laws because she was a welfare-to-work participant.

"All I wanted to do was get a job so my children could be proud of me," said McGhee, a Brooklyn single mother of three, who spoke yesterday. "I shouldn't have to sleep with" my supervisor.

In response to a federal investigation of her case and others, the city's lawyers developed a novel defense: They claimed that workfare participants are not city employees and so have no federal legal protections from sex discrimination.

It's an argument that doesn't pass muster at the U.S. Department of Justice. As Newsday reported June 2, the department filed a lawsuit May 31 to force the city to apply federal civil rights protection to workfare participants. The lawsuit details the alleged harassment against McGhee and three others.

A spokesman for Mary Jo White, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, who filed the lawsuit, declined to comment.

"It's outrageous that the Guiliani administration would take the position that state and city sexual harassment laws don't apply to them," said Philip Taubman, McGhee's lawyer.

That's not necessarily the city's position, according to City Corporation Counsel senior attorney Lorna Goodman. Federal welfare reform law does not allow federal civil rights protections for welfare workers, said Goodman, but the city hasn't yet decided if state and local civil rights laws covers them.

Goodman said her office is studying relevant laws and the cases to come to a position.

McGhee, who worked in maintenance at the Roosevelt Houses in Brooklyn, was eventually transferred several blocks away to Sumner Houses, but she said the supervisor, who is now deceased, continued to harass her. She left the assignment in May 1999 and lost her benefits for a couple of months.

At a news conference yesterday, Mayor Rudolph Guiliani warned against detecting a pattern in the four cases in the federal lawsuit.

"We're talking about 300,000 people that have gone through" the Work Experience Program," he said. "It's very, very hard... to make out a case that somehow constitutes anything more than four cases."

Guiliani said the city agencies involved had investigated charges, "acted on them and came to different conclusions."

However, McGhee said she never got a response to her complaints to her alleged harasser's supervisor and to HRA's human resources department. She said the harassment began in October 1998, with her boss telling her to take off her pants and threatening to "get her" if she stopped dating him.

"I was scared for my life," she said. "I thought I was going to be raped."

McGhee and some 30,000 other welfare recipients are required to work for their benefits in the city's welfare-to-work program. If they don't work, they can loose their benefits.