Garcetti also signed an executive directive that orders city staffers to come up with recommendations for streamlining the complaint review process, expanding training on harassment and discrimination and crafting an independent board to examine "certain complex or sensitive cases." The mayor told reporters that setting up the independent board would help reassure people who might be reluctant to complain about someone in their chain of command.
The portal, MyVoiceLA, is already online in a beta form, and city officials said they will incorporate suggested improvements before relaunching the website in late August. MyVoiceLA is meant specifically for city employees, commissioners, elected officials, volunteers and contractors to report harassment allegations.
Garcetti said the city had decided to focus first on workplace complaints, but that he would look into whether L.A. should expand the system to allow the public to report alleged harassment by city officials, employees and others tied to municipal government.
The Los Angeles Times previously had reported that L.A. lacked a centralized way to track sexual harassment complaints against its workers and that managers had not been required to report such claims to the personnel department. Under guidelines implemented in December, the number of harassment claims reported to the personnel department has surged, the city said.
A recent survey of city employees found that nearly 18 percent of respondents said they had been sexually harassed in the workplace — and more than half of employees who said they had been subjected to harassment did not report the incident to anyone. In addition, fewer than a third of employees who said they had endured harassment gave a positive rating to the process the city has been using to handle such complaints, the survey found.
©2018 the Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
