The Chicago Fire Department needs to put in place stronger policies to deal with the sexual harassment and racial discrimination that have long dogged the agency, the city’s watchdog found in a report released Wednesday.
Inspector General Joseph Ferguson’s audit notes the overwhelmingly male and white department’s history of mistreatment of minorities and women.
While the Fire Department’s anti-discrimination policies “comply with baseline federal, state, and local laws, the policies themselves, as well as the complaint process and training used to enforce and promote them, are insufficient to meet the environmental challenges posed by a command and control emergency service operation like CFD,” Ferguson’s audit reads in part.
Of 45 female employees of the department who responded to a workplace survey Ferguson’s office conducted, 26 reported experiencing sexual harassment.
“Women are treated like garbage. Period,” one respondent said in the survey. “I see it every single day at work. And this survey is going to get buried and nothing will be done, but the City can feel good because they ‘did something.’”
Of 285 overall respondents, 132 reported experiencing racial discrimination. Twenty-eight out of 32 Black respondents reported racial discrimination.
One respondent said that numerous times they had heard and been called racial slurs. A lieutenant also called the respondent early in their career a “Crybaby Minority” and “On other occasions I was called the ‘Affirmative Action’ employee.”
For the most part, the Fire Department agreed to make changes recommended by Ferguson’s office, according to the report.
The department will create written guidelines for referring discrimination and sexual harassment complaints to be addressed, and will train its investigators on how to interview employees who’ve experienced workplace trauma, according to the report.
Read the complete article at: Chicago Tribune
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