How about reporting the manager and getting him fired? Allowing him to keep working put an unfair burden on everybody else: especially those who were “not allowed to be alone with him.”
Is protecting managers with wandering hands a Canadian thing?
I just read something on my twitter timeline about a cafe in Auckland. The barista “would kiss all female staff on the neck and hug them.” The staff hated it and complained to the owners. The owners did nothing. So they all resigned. They took a stand. You shouldn’t have to tolerate managers with wandering hands. You are every bit part of the problem.
The thing is your impression of sexual harassment in restaurants in the United States is so cartoonish that it deserves to be called out. You initially said “Apparently waitresses, f’rinstance, in the US expect to be harassed and groped and leered at by customers and management alike. It comes with the territory.” When challenged on this your response was “Nearly every bar and restaurant I’ve ever been in has been in Canada, and I’ve never seen a waitress groped or slapped on the bum.”
Do you think that in the US if you went to a typical restaurant you would witness a waitress getting groped or slapped on the bum? How is all of this groping and leering happening in America? What do you imagine is happening? You don’t think that maybe the groping and the slapping and the leering is happening in a way that you wouldn’t notice?
That you helped enable a sexual harasser just goes to show that maybe things aren’t as different where you live than it is everywhere else. I live in New Zealand, I’m a male who worked in hospitality at the senior levels for over 15 years, and I didn’t see any groping or bum slapping either. But I’m not going to pretend that we don’t have a problem here, and I’m not going to pretend that we are any better than the folks in the US. And you shouldn’t be doing that either.
Of course he was reported. I don’t know why he wasn’t fired, I was a sixteen year old kid and Not In Charge. That’s why we (a bunch of kids at a Wendy’s) made sure the creep wasn’t left alone with anyone. And he knew why too. He was a pig, we all knew it, and he knew we all knew it.
Yes, if I sat there sipping coffee long enough. This is because numerous women in the service industry have told me I would. You want to disagree, disagree with them.
I don’t appreciate being told I enable sexual predators, so this conversation is over.
…what do you mean “of course it was reported?” How was I supposed to have known that? You’ve buried the lede. That you reported it and nothing was done is the most significant part of your story. So apparently in Canada you can report sexual harassment and nothing will get done about it. How is this so different from anywhere else in the world?
This is the first time that you’ve stated that your opinions were formed by the “numerous women in the service industry” and not just from “things you heard”. Were these women that worked in the service industry representative of the entire United States? Do you think if you sat at a restaurant in Canada long enough you would see some groping and some bum slapping as well?
In all my years in the U.S., the closest I’ve ever seen to a customer getting too personal with a customer was once when I saw a customer ask a waitress who he had never met before if she would go on a date with him. She said no. That was the end of it. I suspect that being harassed a lot for an American waitress is at least once a week. That’s too much, but it doesn’t mean that everybody will notice how much they are harassed. Also, I suspect that the amount of harassment depends on the type of restaurant and the type of customers. A sports bar in a college town is probably going to get a lot more cases of waitress harassment than a restaurant in a big city serving the latest hip exotic cuisine to customers who are at least middle-aged and more likely old.
My apologies about the obvious mistake in the first version of this post.
In all my years in the U.S., the closest I’ve ever seen to a customer getting too personal with a waitress was once when I saw a customer ask a waitress who he had never met before if she would go on a date with him. She said no. That was the end of it. I suspect that being harassed a lot for an American waitress would mean at least once a week. That’s too much, but it doesn’t mean that everybody will notice how much they are harassed. Also, I suspect that the amount of harassment depends on the type of restaurant and the type of customers. A sports bar in a college town is probably going to get a lot more cases of waitress harassment than a restaurant in a big city serving the latest hip exotic cuisine to customers who are at least middle-aged and more likely old.
The difference in homicides is almost completely explained by the number of guns, particularly handguns. This is why a family argument sometimes ends in a death instead of a slap-fight.
I haven’t heard of an epidemic of men’s hands being cut off, but that’s based on my impression.
Nothing personal. It’s the thing men always say about harassment of women. They can’t believe something is so ubiquitous and yet they’ve hardly ever observed it. And women can’t be believed, so it can’t be true.
I would never remotely say that women can’t be believed. What I was saying is almost the opposite of what you think I was saying. I was saying that I had never seen any man getting personal with a woman beyond (I think) one guy thinking that because his waitress was pretty he had the right to ask her for a date. I’ve never seen a customer touch a waitress or make sexually suggestive comments. Of course I know that there’s a lot going on that I have never seen. This is partly because I don’t go to the kind of restaurants where harassment is most common. I was commenting on the posters who say that they didn’t see harassment in the one visit to a restaurant, so it must not happen at all. I was saying that for women who say that there is constant harassment, that sometimes means that it happens once a week, but of course it’s often much more common. And let me make it clear, even once a week is too much. Anybody who sexually harasses a waitress should be at least warned the first time and tossed out on the second time. That’s only if the first time might possibly be ambiguous. If the first time it’s obviously harassment, he should be tossed out the first time it happens. For that matter, if he did something that he can clearly be arrested for, he should be arrested.
I don’t believe lack of access to firepower is the major reason Canadians don’t kill each other off at the same rate as Americans. If people wanted to grab a rifle and start sniping, they could.
I’m aware of the statistics, thank you. I’m also aware of the link between crime and poverty. I’m not aware of anything that supports the claim that the difference between homicide rates is “almost completely” explained by our lack of access to guns.
My view from the UK is that now American women have their men by the balls and they’re not going to let go any time soon. Which considering all the centuries that they’ve been grabbed by the pussy is as just as it is fitting.
Actually it is common in all restaurants, pretty much. It’s ubiquitous, it’s everywhere. And apparently, it is almost completely invisible to men. Some places are worse than others of course. Your imagined “probably once a week” is wishful thinking. I’ve heard plenty of stories from waitresses of men who would make it a point to sit at their table every single day just to be able to harass them. Part of the enjoyment of their lunch.
Your idea of policing is, to be honest, a little silly, in our culture. Who is going to warn them? Who is going to toss them? The reality of the restaurant world, just for one, is that waitresses have to suck it up, they need the job and the restaurant needs the customers.
How do you know that it’s common in all restaurants? Show me some evidence. How can you make such a claim? Have you surveyed a lot of restaurants? Have you read some academic studies showing that it’s true? Or are you just going by some vague claim that you’ve heard somewhere? It’s possible to believe that men notice harassment less than women do without claiming that men are so incredibly stupid that they virtually never notice it.
So what do you propose to do about it? You say that my suggestion that any man who does it should be banned from the restaurant the first time or at least the second time he does it isn’t workable. You say that my suggestion that cases that could be handled by the police wouldn’t work. So what do you propose to do? Are you saying that women just have to accept it? What do you do then? Why don’t women who have suffered harassment as a waitress start a national movement to do something about it? It seems to be working at least somewhat in the Harvey Weinstein case and the other cases that have come up recently.
I’m aware your comments weren’t addressed to me, but allow me to show you evidence that it’s common. In 2014, the Restaurant Opportunities Center United, an advocacy group for restaurant workers, surveyed over 5,000 workers around the country, including tipped workers, both male and female. According to the ROCUnited report, 52% of female tipped workers reported sexual harassment AT LEAST once a week. Note that that is not an average: once a week was the minimum. The survey deliberately avoided the term vague term “sexual harassment” in favor of more specific descriptors: verbal suggestions, physical contact, etc.
On a slightly different note, the report makes it clear that tipped workers in the restaurant industry do NOT simply accept such behaviors as the status quo. Talk to waitstaff, and you can see that for yourself. (Obviously, don’t talk to them at work.) I posted on another thread on this that two aunts of mine were waitresses, and the pinches and remarks angered them. But when you receive sub-minimum wage and count on tips to survive, and when management has a vested interest in pleasing the customer, you can’t complain.
But customers aren’t the only group who harasses waitstaff: management and coworkers do so, too. I wonder if this means the entitlement customers feel to sexually harass waitstaff, particularly women, spills over into these other groups as well.
I’m quite fond of Canada and used to travel to Alberta frequently when I lived close to the U.S.-Canadian border. I think, though, that regardless of country, all of us are prone to generalizing based on our limited experiences, especially when we’re arguing against something we don’t want to be true. It turns out Canadian waitresses are also harassed, I’m sorry to report, and it doesn’t seem like a terribly uncommon occurrence.