Watching high-powered sex offenders fall like dominoes recently has involved plenty of schadenfreude (pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune). for women in many fields. Those of us in the media and the arts have been glad to watch the downfall of previously untouchable editors, producers and comedians who everyone knew were creeps but few people could confront. As Harvey Weinstein can attest, in America today the right kind of bad publicity can undo even the rich and powerful.

But what about the women who are sexually harassed by men who aren’t even a little famous? It’s unlikely many newspapers care about a disgusting night-shift manager at the local Denny’s. The fact is that sexual harassment is more about power than sex. Any industry with extreme power differentials will be afflicted by it. “Raising awareness” is crucial, but not enough.

The service industry, where more than half of workers are women, is especially plagued by sexual harassment. Tipped work is notorious: If you have to please the customer to get paid, you are constantly having to decide between defending yourself and paying rent. The Restaurant Opportunities Centre, an advocacy group seeking fair wages and better treatment for workers, reports that a majority of restaurant employees are sexually harassed weekly.

Domestic workers are another especially vulnerable group. They are often immigrant women of colour, sometimes without legal immigration status, sometimes living in their employers’ homes. This combination makes them uniquely subject to intimate harassment and intimidation. A majority of female farmworkers, who often toil in isolation in the field, have experienced sexual harassment or assault. For these women, shaming their bosses on Twitter or going to a newspaper is, unfortunately, rarely an option — if the predator doesn’t have a big public profile, few will notice the complaint except, perhaps, the guy with the power to fire the person complaining. That’s why women in these fields often take another route: Collective action.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a worker-run human rights organisation based in Florida, for example, has incorporated sexual harassment rules and penalties into its Fair Food Programme — the labour agreement reached after an enormous struggle with fast food companies. It has worked. The coalition says it has got 23 supervisors disciplined for harassment and nine fired. “The bosses and even the growers in the agricultural industry are not public figures, and so public shaming does nothing to change their behaviour,” Julia Perkins, a spokeswoman for the Immokalee Workers, told me.

The Restaurant Opportunities Centre is, for its part, running a campaign to eliminate tipping and replace it with a fair minimum wage. The idea is to use collective power to restructure power dynamics in whole industries.

These organisers stand in a grand tradition. The first female-led American labour struggle was started by teenage girls working in mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the 1830s. One of their central complaints was sexual harassment and assault by supervisors, which left them humiliated, enraged and often pregnant.

Sexual harassment continued to be a focus of union campaigns as America industrialised — the untold story of the labour battles of the 19th century. Not every campaign succeeded, and some unions excluded women workers altogether, but working women have always known that no one fights a gross boss alone.

A union is not, of course, a magical harassment-fighting solution. Abuse can happen within a union, too. In fact, the Service Employees International Union recently fired an executive vice-president over sexual harassment allegations.

Ellen Bravo, one of the pioneering feminists behind 9to5, founded in 1973 to support working women, has done hundreds of harassment training courses for unions. “What we wanted was to root out oppression from the structures that were needed for change,” she said, “so we wanted to see the labour movement really grapple with sexism, and also racism and homophobia”.

When I spoke to Bravo recently, she noted that she often showed recalcitrant male union members how they were undermining solidarity in the shop and therefore their own bargaining position. In essence, tolerating harassment strengthens the boss. Groups like the Immokalee Workers, for example, show how fighting harassment can be incorporated into demands made by men and women fighting together.

Meanwhile, in workplaces all over America, power over others continues to breed sexual abuse. Every time a company fights a union drive, it might as well say, “Enjoy the predations of your manager!”

Women can put an end to this not just by organising their own workplaces, but also by supporting others who are organising or transforming unions. The growing strength of women in workplaces from agricultural fields to restaurants to newsrooms to movie sets means a new sort of solidarity is possible across sectors.

We can imagine what that might look like. The members of Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, an organisation for female farmworkers, recently wrote an open letter to women in Hollywood, offering their support and sharing their experiences fighting harassment. It was a powerful statement of solidarity. The women who are newly speaking out in the limelight should now rally alongside those who have been fighting sexual harassment in the shadows.

— New York Times News Service

Sarah Leonard is the features editor at The Nation and an editor at large at Dissent.