What is an Employer’s Responsibility if You Are Being Harassed by a Client or Customer?
North Carolina sexual harassment attorney, Kathryn Abernethy, discusses what an employer’s responsibility should be if you’re being harassed by a client or customer. This is important for incentive based jobs like sales positions. This is our latest installment of attorney Abernethy’s Q&A series. For more, click here! If you believe you are a victim of being harassed at work, and your employer is not protecting you, call us.
https://youtu.be/skE83-3zy14
Transcript: What is an Employer’s Responsibility if You Are Being Harassed by a Client or Customer?
The employer’s supposed to take effective steps to protect you from further harassment by that client. That gets really dicey in a hurry, and I can’t say if there is perfect clarity in the law in terms of what the employer’s obligations are to you in that instance.
I would certainly argue that the employer should be effectively punishing the client, not the reporter.
Unfortunately, for or example, in sales positions or in positions where your success is evaluated based on how much clients like you, it can absolutely be a factor.
It’s hard to know sometimes in those cases where to draw the line with an employer that says, âwell, I protected the employee. I didn’t send her back to that client. I didn’t make her go back and talk to that guy again.
OK, but if that resulted in her sales numbers crashing because that was her biggest client and now, you’re taking adverse action against her because of her sales numbers, there could be a problem there.
And I and I think that the law is not terribly clear in this area. There’s no bright line that I’ve seen any court draw here. But there’s a balance that must be struck there between protecting the employee from continued harassment and not penalizing the employee either directly or indirectly as a result of making that report of harassment. So those tend to be very complicated situations.
