SHW as a ‘Problem’ of Employment Relations: Subjects of Fixed ‘Work’ and ‘Workplaces’

In and through anti-SHW policies, particularly the POSH Act, the responsibility of ‘prevention, prohibition and redressal’ of SHW is placed with respective employers. This creates a need to problematize the conceptualizations of ‘employment’, ‘work’, ‘workplace’, ‘redressal’, ‘employment relations’ and other such ideas invoked, implied or explained in these policies. In this chapter, I present the fundamental manner in which employers are tied to the policies in the policy’s description of the role of the employer in ‘protecting’ (or creating a safe environment for) employees. The origin of this idea is explained in the naming of SHW itself as ‘sexual harassment at workplaces’, which places the ‘problem’ of sexual harassment happening at an employer’s ‘site’, as the redressable or prosecutable part of the ‘problem’. I present ‘liability’ and compliance’ as the two governing technologies that produce SHW either as a matter of employer liability or as its potential ‘management’ through compliance—which runs the risk of tokenistic compliance by organizations. I further argue for the expansion of the taken-for-granted notions of ‘work’ and ‘workplace’ within the POSH Act.