The problem isn’t just in the kitchen…
“In 2012, Hurricane Grill and Wings in Florida paid $200,000 to settle a sexual harassment suit. Generally this wouldn’t be notable; though 7 percent of women work in the restaurant industry, 37 percent of all sexual harassment claims made to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission involve restaurants.
Yet at this Grill it wasn’t a manager or coworker doing the harassing, it was a customer.
“The servers were frequently grabbed on their breasts and buttocks and humiliated by sexual innuendo, as well as direct invitations to join the harasser and his wife in ménage a trois,” read a press release. In the entire archive of EEOC press releases, this is the one case where a restaurant was prosecuted for allowing a customer to harass an employee. Yet the situation is far from uncommon.”
