Workers in bars, restaurants, clubs and hotels face a barrage of abuse so common it has become entirely normalised, with the vast majority of workers subjected to sexual harassment, according to new evidence seen by the Guardian.
Preliminary research gathered from workers in the hospitality industry found that 89% said they had experienced one or more incidents of sexual harassment in their working life.
Testimony from workers suggests sexual harassment is happening in plain sight, with many employers accused of failing to protect staff from regular abuse.
Of those who had experienced sexual harassment amd who responded to the Unite union’s Not on the Menu survey, 56.3% said they had been targeted by a member of the public and 22.7% said they had been harassed by a manager. At least half of workers who had been harassed said the experience made them want to leave their job and made them feel unsafe and less confident at work.
The findings come after undercover journalists from the Financial Times revealed that hostesses were allegedly groped, sexually harassed and propositioned by attendees of a Presidents Club charity dinner held at the Dorchester hotel.
MPs, union leaders and campaigners have accused the government of weakening protections for workers and called on it to strengthen the law around sexual harassment and reinstate an employer’s duty to protect staff from abusive clients.
Charlotte Bence, a hospitality coordinator for Unite, said there was an urgent need to reinstate the duty to protect staff from third-party harassment, scrapped by the government in 2013.
TimelineSexual harassment: how legal protections have been lost
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The government introduces employment tribunal fees of £1,200, causing the number of cases to drop. It is later forced into a reversal after the supreme court rules the fees are inconsistent with access to justice, following a legal challenge by the trade union Unison.
The government scraps a legal requirement for employers to protect their workers from abuse by third parties such as clients or customers.
The government abolishes an equality questionnaire that allowed sexual harassment claimants to ask questions about a potential claim before going to a tribunal. In a government consultation before the move, 80% of respondents opposed the proposal.
The Deregulation Act removes employment tribunals' powers to make recommendations for the benefit of the wider workforce following complaints.
“Time and time again women – and men – are telling us that sexual harassment is just seen as part of their job,” she said. “Standards of behaviour can slip when people don’t feel there is a need to be professional and people treat staff in bars, clubs and hotels in ways they wouldn’t dream of doing so in other environments.”
The appeal for experiences is ongoing, but of about 300 respondents to the survey, 84.7% said they had witnessed sexual harassment of other people – showing that clients or bosses felt they could behave inappropriately with impunity, Bence said.
One of the most damning initial findings of the survey was the lack of clarity over sexual harassment policy, she added. When asked whether their workplace had an anti-sexual harassment policy in place, 77% said no or they did not know.
While 40% of workers said they were confident or very confident that their employer would deal with a complaint of sexual harassment, the majority were unsure or lacked faith in their management. One women wrote that she had been harassed and grabbed by a stag party when she was 16. “[At] the end of my shift when I told management that I was really upset over the incident, the reply I got was that I needed to ‘learn to take a joke’,” she said.
Even when complaints were dealt with, the sheer number made it difficult to flag up all incidents, said another bar worker, who added that she had been encouraged to report incidents. “The problem is [the managers] are men who have no idea how many times it happens a night,” she said. “I currently report the 1% of situations which I deem the worst. If I reported every single incident they would begin to find it frustrating. I would be seen as a pain who’s always complaining about someone.”
Q&AShare your experiences of sexual harassment
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According to ONS figures there are more than 2.4 million people working in the hospitality industry in the UK, 54% of whom are women. Analysis of employment data by the Change Group found that while three in five kitchen and catering assistants are women, only one in four chefs are female. One female head chef described persistent attempts to undermine her “by talking about my body, my sex life, what I might be like in bed, how many people I might have slept with, what sexual positions I like, etc.”
Seven out of 10 waiting staff in the UK are female, but 58% of senior restaurant and catering staff are men. One waitress said she had been asked if she was “on the menu” by a customer when she was 17; another recalled having to rescue another waitress who had been pulled into a toilet cubicle by a customer. “She was banging on the door and we eventually had to call security, who stepped in. When the customer unlocked the door he was claiming it to be ‘a laugh’,” she said.