In college, if you don’t work in the restaurant or bar industry, you probably know someone who does. For many college students, working nights at a bar is how rent gets paid each month.
Working in the bar industry has a lot of perks like the late-night schedule that goes around classes, sometimes easy money and the fun you can have working behind the bar. However, those big tips usually don’t come because you’re especially good at pouring drinks. Bartenders are asked for their number, gawked at, or groped far more often than other professions. When working for tips pays the rent, it can be easy to let things slide.
Sexual harassment is never OK and the harasser’s blood alcohol content is an  unacceptable excuse. It is especially not okay when the creep on the other side of the bar asking your bra size and staring at your butt is the same person that signs your paycheck.
Seven percent of American women work in the restaurant industry, yet 37 percent of all sexual harassment claims to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission come from the restaurant industry, according to a report by the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United and Forward Together.
John Besh and the Besh Restaurant Group are under fire after accusations of sexual harassment and hostile work environments were made by current and former employees. Unfortunately, this type of work environment is neither rare nor hard to find. While many feel it’s just the way the bar and restaurant industries run, I’ll remind you that sexual harassment is never OK.
It’s no secret that many bars hire and fire bartenders based on their looks. And while you might say that sexual harassment is just a part of a bartending job for a good-looking female, there is no instance in which sexual harassment is deemed acceptable. If you wouldn’t demean and sexualize a man at his job you shouldn’t demean and sexualize a woman at hers.
Imposing a uniform of short, tight black tops and shorts with fishnets in a casual bar setting is using power as a boss to sexually harass female employees when male employees wear black pants and a loosely fitting
collared polo. Someone could always just go work somewhere else without that uniform, but that does not make the sexual harassment okay and offers no solution to an uncomfortable work environment.
Supervisors have a free pass to make lewd comments, grope employees, impose sexist uniform policies and generally be creeps as long as no tangible action is taken. If an employee quits under these circumstances they are out of a job and cannot file a lawsuit to recover lost wages.
Lawsuits are not the answer to everything, but luckily the key to avoiding sexual harassment lawsuits is easy: don’t sexually harass people.
There should be no confusion on what steps an employee can take to report sexual harassment in the workplace, even if it is the person who signs your paycheck making the lewd comments. Sexual harassment should never just be part of a job. It should be taken seriously by customers, employees, supervisors and owners alike.
Breanna Smith is a 21-year-old mass communication senior from Baton Rouge, Louisiana.