Is there a North Carolina Sexual Harassment Law?
North Carolina sexual harassment attorney, Kathryn Abernethy, talks whether North Carolina even has a sexual harassment law. North Carolina is one of many states that does not have a state sexual harassment law. She discusses this in more detail on our video series on North Carolina employment law. The transcription is below. If you’d like to see the full playlist, click here.
Transcription: Is there a North Carolina Sexual Harassment Law?
We are entirely dependent on Title 7 of the of the US Code. Unless there are 15 or more employees where you work, you don’t have any protection from sexual harassment. That is, I think, a stain on our North Carolina legislature that they have failed in all these years to enact effective sexual harassment protections for women who work for smaller employers, but it is a persistent problem.
So here in North Carolina, you have no protection from sexual harassment if you work for an employer that has fewer than 15 employees. What I will tell you is that when you go to an attorney here in North Carolina, the creative ones of us will find some other claim to try to bring for you.
Sometimes that is, for example, a battery claim, a negligent hiring or negligent retention claim, or sometimes an intentional affliction of emotional distress claim.
But that’s all of us getting really creative because we don’t have a way to get to the heart of the problem, which is that you’re being sexually harassed at work.
And those and those creative solutions have their own requirements that you may or may not be able to meet in certain very clear sexual harassment situations in North Carolina workplaces.
So, North Carolina has a lot of work to do in legislatively in protecting women in this state from sexual harassment. Year after year, lawyers here in North Carolina have been launched lobbying the North Carolina State legislature about this to try to get them to pass some rudimentary sexual harassment law that will protect in some way women who work at smaller employers. And it has fallen on deaf ears year after year after year. We’ve seen no action from the legislature on it. It is a gaping hole in North Carolina employment law enforcement mechanisms.
