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117: Sexual or racial harassment by person other than employer
or “What to do if someone else at work or a customer bothers you in a sexual or racial way”
You could also call this:

“If someone keeps bothering you at work after you've complained, and your boss doesn't try to stop it, it's like your boss is doing the bad thing.”

You need to know about a situation where someone makes a complaint about sexual or racial harassment at work. If the person who was complained about does it again, and your employer doesn’t try to stop it from happening, this is what the law says:

If you’ve complained about someone sexually or racially harassing you at work, and that person does it again by asking you for sexual favours or behaving in a way that offends, humiliates, or intimidates you, it’s a problem. If your employer or their representative doesn’t do everything they can to stop it from happening again, the law treats it as if your employer did the harassment.

This means you can say you have a personal grievance against your employer for sexual or racial harassment, even though it wasn’t actually your employer who did it. A personal grievance is a formal complaint you can make when you think you’ve been treated unfairly at work.

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Next up: 119: Presumption in discrimination cases

or “If a worker shows their boss did something unfair because of their union activities, the boss has to prove they didn't do it on purpose.”
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Part 9 Personal grievances, disputes, and enforcement
Personal grievances

118Sexual or racial harassment after steps not taken to prevent repetition

  1. This section applies if—

  2. a person in relation to whom an employee has made a complaint under section 117(2) either—
    1. makes to that employee after the complaint a request of the kind described in section 108(1)(a); or
      1. subjects that employee after the complaint to behaviour of the kind described in section 108(1)(b) or section 109; and
      2. the employer of that employee, or a representative of that employer, has not taken whatever steps are practicable to prevent the repetition of such a request or such behaviour.

        1. If this section applies, the employee is deemed for the purposes of this Act and for the purposes of any employment agreement to have a personal grievance by virtue of having been sexually harassed or racially harassed, as the case may be, in the course of the employee's employment as if the request or behaviour were that of the employee's employer.

        Compare
        • 1991 No 22 s 36(3)