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GM CEO Mary Barra Pledges Automaker To Be ‘Harassment-Free’ Workplace

Sexual harassment allegations have hit numerous industries. Politics, entertainment and the media have been roiled by allegations and the firing of some once-iconic figures. General Motors CEO Mary Barra will have no part of harassment in the workplace and promised the automaker she leads will always be a “harassment-free” workplace.

The Detroit Free Press reported on Barra’s comments during an Automotive Press Association reception in a report published on Monday. There, Barra said, “It’s unacceptable to not have a policy (against sexual harassment).”

“We encourage our employees that if something is happening, that they raise it. There will be no retaliation.”

Barra has been an instrumental figure in changing the culture inside of GM. Not only the working culture but how GM operates as a business unit as well. Notably, Barra installed the “Speak Up for Safety” initiative to encourage and recognize employees for contributing ideas that make vehicles safer, and for speaking up when they see something that could impact customer safety.

Former GM Authority staff writer.

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Comments

  1. Does this include women wearing revealing clothes, tight dresses and skirts, cleavage, and so on?

    Of coarse Not!

    How could we ever blame anything on women these days, how could women ever be responsible for how men react to them.

    Women flirt just as much if not more then men do it’s just that us men have no interest in complaining about it!

    Can I request that I work in a office or on a team that only have men? Who would want to work with women after watching all these women come out of the wood work and destroy all of these careers!

    So you mean to tell me that not one woman has sexually harassed a man at work, while everyday it seems like one guy after another keeps losing their jobs. And so far not one woman has!

    This is a bunch of crap if you ask me!

    Reply
    1. “Can I request that I work in a office or on a team that only have men? ”

      You think you wouldn’t get hit on if you worked only with a team of men? Seems to me you might like that kind of arrangement. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

      Reply
    2. Google ‘doth protest too much’

      Reply
  2. This is a problem that needs to be addressed and not treated like a witch hunt.

    Right now there are now established guide lines or limitations here. Right now if some woman decides that she dislikes someone or somebody she only has to say she was harassed. Right now they are going after people often that are convicted with only the word of the accuser.

    Many of these cases are decades old and may not be corroborated correctly. In some cases it was behavior that was tolerated at the time right or wrong and to enforce todays standard on. Most law take place on things that happened after the creation not before.

    I agree that the work place should be a safe place for all but we need to set some hard fast guide lines.

    Also many people need to look at their own behavior. They go around like a human petri dish and wonder why they are treated as such. Better behaved people are treated better. You want to act like anything goes in your life you will be treated as you present yourself.

    As it stands today we have innocent people being taken out with no chance to defend themselves. It is kind of like the many teachers kids say that they were touched then later say they just said that to get back at them for a bad grade or detention. By then the damage is done.

    Even a killer is innocent till proven beyond all doubt.

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    1. All of the high profile firings had verifiable evidence…

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      1. It is not the high profiles we are worried about.

        There is nothing in place to protect men from women that may just decide to take you out because they don’t like you or have a grudge for some reason.

        Even a murder has to be convicted in a court of their priers beyond a shadow of doubt and in many cases that is not true here.

        Women should not have to put up with BS but men should not be left hanging out in the wind to the whim of any women that may want to take him out just based on her word only.

        FYI not all claims are verifiable. Even in cases where I think the guy may be guilty the evidence is circumstantial at best.

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        1. “There’s nothing in place to protect men against women”, yeah???

          Courts
          Judges
          Police investigators
          Lawyers
          DA’s
          (and the gender balance in those professions is all in your favor, Scott3)

          Scott3, you just literally denied the existence of the court system.

          Now, look up Jemma Beale and see if she escaped justice.

          “Using qualitative and quantitative analysis, researchers studied 812 reports of sexual assault from 2000-2003 and found a 2.1 percent rate of false reports (Heenan & Murray 2006).”

          “ A study of 136 sexual assault cases in Boston from 1998-2007 found a 5.9 percent rate of false reports (Lisak et al., 2010).”

          You literally couldn’t be more wrong, Scott3. There’s far more chance of you being raped man-on-man than anybody being sent to jail on a false rape-report. Fool.

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          1. Sounds to me like tool3 is afraid that the times are changing and his alt-wrong ways are catching up to him.

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        2. “Hanging in the wind on the word of one woman?”

          Weinstein – 80
          Cosby – 50
          Moore – 15 and counting
          Trump – over 10 and still coming
          Bill Clinton – more than 10…

          Hardly any of these women know each other, none of them have spoken to each other before speaking to their lawyers, and all of them told close friends in the days after their assault.

          Hanging by one word from one person, BS! You really believe BriteBart, don’t you? Fool. He’s Roosky.

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        3. “there’s nothing in place to protect alt-wrong pedophiles!”

          waah, waah!

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    2. “As it stands today we have innocent people being taken out with no chance to defend themselves.”

      Provide evidence. That doesn’t come out of your @$$.

      Reply
      1. … crickets…

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  3. Well thank goodness Ray Moore lost his election in Alabama last night to Jones .
    All sexual harassment in any industry should never be tolerated , but I think there are degrees of the harassment that need to be addressed . Not all of the men in the news lately should all be placed in the same category .
    As a bad example( I know ) it’s like murder for instance , you have manslaughter , attempted manslaughter and murder 1 , 2 , and 3 . It’s all bad but the punishments should be different .
    Anyone who abuses a woman or man needs to be punished and that punishment should reflect the degree of the abuse.
    What I really worry about is what our children think when the President of the U.S has his own problems with sexual harassment and that tape of him at Access Hollywood explaining what he could get away with and then he endorses Moore who was a pedophile . But I wish these woman wouldn’t have waited so long to bring up the charges , but I can understand why they told know one at the time .
    I have a lot of women I work with and there are a few that you can joke around with in a certain way that you wouldn’t with the others and it’s also recipricated . Locker room talk , okay . But it’s all done in fun and there is no grabbing or harassing . And just because a woman dresses a certain way doesn’t give license for anything at all .
    There is a cultural change happening and that is a good thing .

    Reply
    1. ‘I have a lot of women I work with and there are a few that you can joke around with in a certain way that you wouldn’t with the others and it’s also recipricated . Locker room talk , okay . But it’s all done in fun and there is no grabbing or harassing. And just because a woman dresses a certain way doesn’t give license for anything at all. There is a cultural change happening and that is a good thing.”

      The usual suspects above want to blame women for being sexy WITHOUT first admitting our planet is a global patriarchy. In America a woman is not respected as equal to a man, and therefore, male dominated industries and corporations cast a ‘role’ for women.

      So if a woman is dressed all sexy and is playfully flirty… is this what she WANTS to do? Or is it what men WANT her to do because their wives are as fat and ugly and as stupid as their husbands?

      Reply
      1. John you have given another example of how far out of touch you are from reality.

        Let’s clear up what we are addressing here clearly and coherently.

        First off our point is that under present conditions the women you joke with and locker room talk with could take you out in a heart beat should they chose to. All they have to do is complain about what you said and you could be gone at most companies with little chance to defend yourself.

        They can dress and act as they like but it has gotten to the level of a witch hunt in some cases.

        Some one like Harvey Wienstien should burn in Hell. But even he and anyone else who stands accused should be given a chance to face his accusers and provide due process if the have one especially in cases of circumstantial eveidence where it is his word vs her word.

        The bottom line here is guidelines and standards need to be set. Then people accused also should be given a hearing to defend themselves.

        Even Charles Manson got a hearing.

        John you Might just do yourself some good and drop the locker room BS and just be professional. If not you will at some point stand accused. Better behaved people generally are treated better and run less risk.

        Those who are found guilty should be punished and those that stand accused but no evidence to convict should not be punished.

        Anyone found guilty should face the music but we should not punish anyone who have no evidence against them.

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        1. This guy really gets it! Finally a guy who see threw the BS

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  4. Was Ray Moore convicted of a crime? If the answer to this question is no then what happened to him is ridiculous! You should never be suspended or get fired from your job because someone makes a accusation! The fact that these companies are firing people without due process is ridiculous and it must be stopped! And the people who support it they will think differently when someone decides to tell a story about you.

    Do I think people should be harassed at work no, but my sympathy level goes to zero when that person speaks up 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 years later. If it didn’t bother you enough to say something back then then I don’t want to hear about it today! It’s sad no pathetic that we have gotten to this point in our society!

    I am glad I work with a bunch of men so these issues don’t effect me. But if I had to then I would be very reluctant to work with women and even more cautionous about ever speaking to them. As a man you have zero ideas as to what a woman will find offensive. Women can’t be trusted in a work place!

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    1. If they’re a child, they literally can’t speak up. No child wants to be known as raped, they always think that’s worse than catching the perp.

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    2. Men rape men too, at about a rate of 20% of all rapes. That means your all-man workplace is just as dangerous for you as a co-ed workplace is for women. Look up boys schools in the Royal Commission into child abuse in Australia.

      You want to surround yourself with sausages? Then don’t get upset when one ends up in your ….

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  5. His name is Roy, not Ray. As for the story, Mary Barra can sexually harass me anytime she wants. 😉

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  6. I find it troubling that many GM Auth. members despise Due Process/The 6th Amendment.

    Now if you don’t mind, I really don’t care for the person in the next office. I’m going to fabricate a story in which it makes him out to be a pedo, so he gets terminated. Anyone want to assist me in pulling the handle on the gallows? Due Process is for suckers! 🙁

    Heck, if this is the way the world works now, I won’t stop at 1, I’ll get 6-7 people fired by lunch time…based purely on accusations. There are a few people around here that are disliked so much, I could easily get some others to corroborate my “story”.

    Reply
    1. You are correct. Some of these folks have no care for equal rights and are tools of the far left that want to change our country to where they have been fooled into believing they will be cared for in luxury by a government that could care less about them.

      You hit my point exactly as while there are people that need to be stopped everyone and I mean everyone should be heard and judged in a court of law.

      We have due process in this country and we must abide by it. The tactics today of speaking out and trying to destroy people with no evidence is so very Stalin like. The Soviets sent many people to Siberia based on groundless testimony.

      We should not protect the guilty but we should be forced to prove them guilty before we punish them.

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      1. Making knee-jerk reactions based solely on emotion is both foolish and child-like, but there are those that are always willing to defend it.

        A person can be standing over a dead body with a bloody knife, screaming “I just killed him!!!” and the US Constitution grants him/her the right to a fair trial. That is the way it is. I’m sorry if this displeases some of you.

        1. Gather evidence
        2. File formal charges
        3. Try him/her in a court of law
        4. Obtain a verdict
        5. Administer a punishment if the defendant is found guilty

        Wow, I feel like I’m in 6th grade again.

        Reply
        1. 1. Gather Evidence. For example, if people don’t know each other and have never spoken to each other, and yet they have EXACTLY THE SAME STORY of attack, that means they’re giving proper evidence.

          2. File Formal Charges. Which is exactly what Gloria Allred and all the other lawyers are doing. Cosby went to court because he had been formally charged. Did you think it was the fashion police for that cardigan he was wearing?

          3. Try them in a court of law. Do you mean like Cosby? Like the private school boy? If you mean the resignations from workplaces, well stupid fool, they were VOLUNTARY, which means they knew they were going down in court and the board of their company (which includes the company lawyers) knew the resignee was guilty.

          4. Obtain a verdict – like Cosby? Like the private school boy? Like the thousands and thousands of court verdicts that confirm police investigations that rapes did IN FACT occur?

          5. Administer a punishment if the defendant is found guilty. Tool/Fool3, is your flat-out denial that men ever rape ever, is that what you would call “accepting the judges verdict” and helping with the punishment, or is what you do called “Gaslighting” The court system and never EVER believing that rape occurs in fact?

          Infamous06 you are giving jailed rapists comfort in the same way that Jane Fonda gave comfort to the enemy in Vietnam. From now on I’m going to call you InfamousJane. If you were in 6th grade today, you wouldn’t pass, you would be sent back to Kindergarten where the teachers would have to start your education from scratch.

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          1. Your ad hominem-laden diatribes are amusing at best. When you can finally hold a discussion without the nonsensical name-calling, I will entertain your posts. Until then, they are merely incoherent ramblings of a very angry human being.

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      2. Scott3 – you’re comment right here is EXACTLY:
        “The tactics today of speaking out and trying to destroy people with no evidence“

        YOU are speaking out. Where’s YOUR evidence???

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    2. Infamous06, please DO what you said you would do. Go ahead and spread false accusations and when the police find that the only source of the accusations is one person, instead of over 10 people with independently verified stories who never met or spoke beforehand, that one person, YOU, is gonna get the same treatment as Jemma Beale. Meanwhile, courts will punish both rapists AND false-accusers like YOU.

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      1. OT — you realize Infamous and tool3 are having a sockpuppet discussion?

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        1. Yup, you’re right, it’s the “ad hominem diatribe” that gives it away, I should have known. Cheers mate!

          Reply
        2. The old far left argument of if you can’t make a intelligent reply you attack or insult.

          Reply
          1. Don’t you Russians have anything better to do? Like take driving lessons?

            Reply
  7. Dealing with women in the work place is getting harder and harder and I want no part of it! If they keep this up more and more men will choose to not work with women

    Reply

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