‘But It's Your Job To Be Friendly’: Employees Coping With and Contesting Sexual Harassment from Customers in the Service Sector

Abstract

This article analyses how employees in the service sector respond to sexual harassment from customers and attempts to explain why this is so. There are only a small number of previous studies examining the issue of customer-perpetrated sexual harassment. Those that have been conducted have detailed the nature and prevalence of sexual harassment from customers, but this research lags behind employee experience and some emerging policy responses to this issue. The extant literature, whilst growing, remains largely limited to documenting the phenomenon. In this article, we attempt to create a deeper analysis of customer-perpetrated harassment by conducting a new review of the literature to develop propositions about how employees respond to it and the factors that influence their responses. These propositions are analysed in relation to a qualitative pilot study with 15 interviewees who had experienced sexual harassment from customers to understand how they reacted and why. The article shows how the social norms and precarious working conditions of the service sector constrain employees from seeking formal redress, leading to the enactment of informal coping strategies and temporary contestations of the situation. This research is important for building our understanding of the influence of workplace context for framing employee responses to customer sexual harassment.

The “Customer” is Not Always Right: Third-Party Sexual Harassment in Libraries

“…These gendered power differentials are further exacerbated by customeremployee power relations, where customers, patrons, clients, and patients hold power over frontline employees. Work in women's and gender studies, as well as social psychology, also explore employees' perceptions of and responses to sexual harassment (e.g., Morganson & Major, 2014;Good & Cooper, 2016).…”

“…Despite growing calls within LIS for further examination of the issue (Carlton, 2017;Dewitt, 2017;Jensen, 2017;McLain & Civitello, 2017), third-party sexual harassment against library workers is largely ignored and research on this topic is noticeably lacking. Studies in other fields demonstrate that most instances of third-party sexual harassment go unreported, and that employees often feel obligated to react to these occurrences independently, with informal responses and coping strategies (Gettman & Gelfand, 2007;Good & Cooper, 2016;Hughes & Tadic, 1998;Morganson & Major;2014;Vaughn, 2002). The under-reporting and normalcy of this issue in LIS has likely contributed to its lack of acknowledgement in academic and professional scholarship.…”

“…The #MeToo movement has recently brought to popular consciousness the pervasiveness of sexual harassment in the workplace (Drexler, 2017;Lublin, 2017). Indeed, workplace sexual harassment is an ongoing issue particularly for women working in feminized and serviceoriented labour (Good & Cooper, 2016;Korczynski & Evans, 2013;Yagil, 2008). While workplace sexual harassment discourse tends to focus on harassment between employees and employers, in libraries third party sexual harassment is often experienced by frontline library workers and is perpetuated by the very patrons they endeavour to support (Manley, 1993;McLain & Civitello, 2017).…”

“…While workplace sexual harassment discourse tends to focus on harassment between employees and employers, in libraries third party sexual harassment is often experienced by frontline library workers and is perpetuated by the very patrons they endeavour to support (Manley, 1993;McLain & Civitello, 2017). Furthermore, library workers may receive little to no training about how to deal with sexual harassment by patrons, or how to protect and take care of themselves on the service desk, despite the fact that employees may experience significant and long-term stress, anxiety, depression, a feeling of loss of control at work, and fear for one's personal safety as a consequence of being sexually harassed (Gettman & Gelfand, 2007;Good & Cooper, 2016;Morganson & Major, 2014).…”

‘It Just Comes with the Territory’: Discursive Normalisation of Sexual Harassment in Bars

“…Gilbert, Guerrier, and Guy (1998) found that 19 per cent of companies they studied reported that employees had "resigned due to harassment by customers" and a further "23 per cent could not say one way or another if this was a reason" (p. 51). Likewise, Good and Cooper (2016) argue that customer sexual harassment is a "significant issue", and "customers are increasingly being recognized as potential perpetrators of sexual harassment in public policy and legislation" (p. 3). But why is it the case that customer sexual harassment is so common in the hospitality industry?…”