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Email ThisIs asking your secretary to perform the act of fetching coffee, one of the modern office’s most mundane chores, an implied form of sexual harassment?
“Yes” is according to Tamara Klopfenstein of Levittown, NY.
Tamara’s story, first brought to my attention by Ask A Manager and covered in more depth by the Philadelphia Inquirer, highlights how delicate the relationship between boss and employee can be:
After working for a few weeks, her (male) bosses asked her to get their coffee for them. She declined, and her manager e-mailed her, saying: “This is not open for debate. Please don’t make an easy task a big deal.” Klopfenstein felt that getting coffee “reinforced outdated gender stereotypes,” so the next day, when she was asked to get coffee again, she sent an e-mail that read: “I don’t expect to serve and wait on you by making and serving you coffee every day.” Nine minutes later, she was fired. Klopfenstein promptly sued the company for sexual discrimination and sexual harassment. The judge ruled: “The act of getting coffee is not, by itself, a gender-specific act,” and dismissed the case. But Klopfenstein’s attorneys argue that “Some tasks are inherently more offensive to women.”
Ultimately, a federal court judge threw the case out due to lack of merit, which in my opinion, was the right call.
While a woman fetching coffee for her male bosses smacks of historical discrimination against women in the workplace, the Philadelphia Inquirer points out that,
To show discrimination, Klopfenstein would have had to be able to point to a male worker with a similar status who didn’t have to get coffee.
But the previous receptionists were all women and didn’t object to getting coffee for vice presidents Jay Shrager and Richard Blum, Jackson said.
Putting the harassment angle aside, the real issue at stake here is: can we refuse the parts of our jobs we don’t like?
Ms. Klopfenstein openly refused a directive from her bosses, to bring them coffee everyday at 3pm, something that all of her predecessors had willingly done in the past. Her bosses reiterated their request and explained that it was non-optional. Ms. Klopfenstein then refused to carry out an ‘essential’ (and I use this term loosely) job function and was fired.
I once watched a co-worker go through a similar battle. After several years of working at the company, she one day flat out refused to do half of her job duties—duties which were essential to the business. Management went out and hired a younger, cheaper replacement and a few months later let my co-worker go. Is it disappointing that an experienced employee was let go for a younger, cheaper version? Sure. But management hadn’t wanted to go out and hire someone new. By refusing to do her job, my co-worker forced management to make a choice, and can you really blame them for not wanting to be loyal to someone who “wasn’t a team player?”
I myself have had to do my fair share of grunt work outside the scope of my official job duties. One of the best bosses I ever had the pleasure to work for used to ask me to schedule department meetings for him. I wasn’t his assistant and I wasn’t the leader of the team, although I was in his department. Generally it was common practice for the leader of a meeting to schedule it themselves, so it felt weird that he would ask me to do something like that.
But did I do it willingly and without complaint? Of course.
For something as mundane as scheduling a meeting or fetching coffee, why start a war? Even if you don’t necessarily like doing boring tasks like copying, filing or delivering mail, someone has to do it and why risk ending up on your boss’ bad side over something so trivial? As Audrey Jackson, an administrative assistant at an engineering firm in Center City, put it:
“I would do anything for my boss except sleep with him, because he’s married,” she said.
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Overall your point is totally right. We can’t just pick and choose the part of our job that we want to do. But I don’t know that the question “Can we refuse the parts of our jobs that we don’t like” applies to bringing coffee from the desk to the boss at 3 p.m. every day, as in the facts of this case. (He put it on her calendar).
For this situation, the question is really, “Can we refuse to knuckle under to a gendered power game?” And the answer in the U.S. is, “No.”
I’m not sure I like that. I think if we all let people get away with humiliating us for sport at work because it’s seen as paying your dues, then the workplace is going to be a mess. Personally, I’ve tried it both ways. I got more done, and more respect, when I stood up for myself. (Obviously though, I didn’t send my boss an email saying, “Hell no, I won’t comply with your request.”)
I don’t think tolerating bullies pays off in the long run. And I do think the boss in this case sounds like a total ass.
I think it’s important to fulfill all aspects of your job duties to the best of your abilities. Very few people love every bit of their job, but if everyone threw a hissyfit and decided they were above doing those things then there would be nobody picking up lunches for meetings, fetching coffee, scrubbing toilets, etc.
I used to sit outside the department head’s office at one place where I worked. I wasn’t his assistant or anything, I just had the cubicle closest to his office. He asked me to get him coffee and I am a tea drinker, so I had no idea how to even make the stuff. I put in several spoonfuls of instant coffee and gave it to him black. I’m guessing it wasn’t particularly palatable because after a few days he no longer asked me to get his coffee.