New York Assembly is (finally) moving to require more accountability for public officials who sexually harass employees

Elected officials in all three branches of government might get clarification soon on who exactly they work for. A key step this week involves the Assembly Codes Committee, which is expected to pass legislation Tuesday that would close a legal loophole that exempts local and state government from being responsible for sexual harassment committed by public officials. Past court rulings have held that they did not technically work for this or that city, county, town, village or state Legislature.

The bill is a top priority for the Sexual Harassment Working Group of former state Senate and Assembly staffers as part of a package of six bills aimed at addressing misconduct by public officials. The bills have remained stuck in political limbo in the year after a litany of allegations against former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (who resigned in August as he faced impeachment and removal from office for a range of alleged wrongdoing) highlighted the outstanding problem of sexual harassment in government, but the situation could change if key bills get approved by the Legislature amid a wider push for ethics reform this year. 

“For too long, our own state government has stood outside and largely above the law when it comes to sexual harassment,” Assembly Member Yuh-Line Niou, a former legislative staffer who is sponsoring the bill with state Sen. Andrew Gounardes, said in a text. “This is a critical step towards ending the culture of impunity that has made Albany a toxic workplace for staffers and a source of shame in our mishandling of their sexual harassment complaints.”

Passage through the Codes Committee comes two weeks after her bill got approved by the Governmental Operations Committee where it died last year. This opens the way for the legislation to reach the Assembly floor in the coming days where it could become the first of the six bills to pass the chamber. Exactly when that might happen remains unclear. “Once it gets out of committee, presumably it would go to the floor,” Codes Committee Chair Jeffrey Dinowitz told City & State. A spokesperson for Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie said “there are bills moving through our committee process and being vetted by our members” when asked about a timetable for passing the package. 

Other legislation in the package backed by the working group would double the statute of limitations on workplace harassment from three to six years, limit how nondisclosure agreements can be enforced and, and bar the use of so-called “no-rehire clauses” that give employers leverage over workers. Another bill would require lobbyists to complete anti-sexual harassment training annually. A sixth bill would expand whistleblower protections for people who report abuse. The first four bills await votes by the full Senate while the final two bills remain in committee. A spokesperson for state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins did not respond to a request for comment by publication time. 

Legislative progress does not amount to real world change, however, until bills get through both houses of the state Legislature and signed into law by the governor. That happened in 2019 when the previously narrow legal definition of sexual harassment got changed after a blockbuster hearing by members of the state Senate and Assembly on the issue of sexual harassment in state government. “If you've got a scorecard looking at progress made in Albany over the last two years then we deserve pretty high marks in comparison to the years before,” longtime state Sen. Liz Krueger said. Misconduct allegations against Cuomo renewed calls for additional reforms last year as former staffers and other women came forward. The state Senate passed the legislative package backed by the working group, with the exception of the whistleblower bill, on May 26. Heastie announced the formation of a legislative working group on sexual harassment that same day. “There just doesn't seem to be a sense of urgency around protecting workers,” Erica Vladimer, a co-founder of the Sexual Harassment Working Group, said in an interview last week.

The lack of progress in the Assembly comes down to the bill not getting through their relevant committee before the regular legislative session ended in June. “There are any number of bills that passed in the Assembly that don't pass in the Senate,” Judiciary Committee Chair Charles Lavine, whose committee held three of the bills that died in the Assembly last year, told City & State. “These are all good bills. They're getting the consideration they deserve and I'm confident that they will be reported (to the full chamber).” Governmental Operations Chair Kenneth Zebrowski did not respond to a request for comment about why the lobbyist sexual harassment training bill and the legislation sponsored by Niou and Gounardes did not get through his committee last year. Government Employees Committee Chair Peter Abbate, Jr. said most bills in his committee typically take two or more years to pass, which hampered the whistleblower bill last year. “I would say it wouldn’t pass before the budget,” he said of its prospects moving forward.

While the legislative package appears to be on hold for now, some progress against sexual harassment by public officials could be made through the state budget process. Gov. Kathy Hochul is proposing to replace the much-criticized Joint Commission on Public Ethics with a new state ethics body whose commissioners would be appointed by law school deans rather than the governor and legislative leaders. Good government groups have backed the proposal despite some specific criticisms, and key lawmakers say including it in the budget will smooth its passage through both chambers. Success here might even jumpstart other legislative efforts to address harassment one year after misconduct allegations began accelerating the fall of Cuomo. “It's hard to pass these huge bill packages,” Krueger said. “That's why I think it's valuable that the governor took a stab, even if an imperfect stab at replacing JCOPE ... Democracy is a really imperfect model, (but) it's just the one we've got.”