WORKPLACE HARASSMENT COMPLAINT EVIDENCE TRACKING SYSTEM USING BLOCKCHAIN

Abstract

Workplace harassment can have serious negative consequences for both the victim and the employer. However, many victims choose not to report harassment to their companies and victims who decide to make a formal complaint often say nothing was done about it. Having these problems in mind, this work explored the use of blockchain technology to build a system to create evidence of the stakeholders' actions from the moment a complaint is filed until its resolution, in an attempt to empower the victims. Throughout the work, the potential benefits and limitations of blockchain technology for this application were explored. Considering the characteristics of blockchain, this work proposed a possible architecture for a Workplace Harassment Complaint Evidence Tracking System. The architecture was discussed with a focus on protecting user privacy while still being able to create evidence that can empower the victim and be used by the employer to demonstrate compliance with laws and regulations. Two proofs-of-concept (POC) of the proposed architecture were specified and implemented using Ethereum Blockchain. One of them was tailored to a fixed procedure based on the suggestions made by the Code of Practice Detailing Procedures for Addressing Bullying in the Workplace from Ireland. The other was built to be flexible, to fit a variety of different procedures. They were evaluated in terms of functionality, latency and cost. Experiments showed that the cost of deploying the flexible smart contract was 25% lower than to deploy the smart contract developed for the fixed procedure. However, performing the transactions in the flexible smart contract was, in general, more expensive, which resulted in the use of the flexible contract costing 5% more in total when both POCs were used to perform a general workflow. During the evaluation, this work also showed that Ethereum Blockchain prices' volatility can be a big concern when using this blockchain in an enterprise environment.