Customer harasses employee: Are you liable?
July 7, 2008 by Sam NarisiPosted in: Harassment, In this week's e-newsletter, Latest News & Views
HR spends a lot of time and energy preventing harassment by supervisors. But what if a worker’s harassed by a customer or other non-employee? Can you be held liable?
Answer: It depends.
If some preventive or corrective action was possible, but the company didn’t take it, that could result in a lawsuit. For example:
A representative from a vendor you do business with comes on site regularly. One of your employees complains that he’s sexually harassed her. The company has a few options, such as telling someone at his company about the complaint or making sure the accuser has no future contact with him.
If no additional actions are taken, it’s likely the company could wind up in court.
As with harassment by your employees, the keys to staying safe are: 1) training your managers to look out for it, and 2) dealing with complaints promptly.
Tags: complaints, non-employee, policy
July 7th, 2008 at 6:16 am
I discovered your homepage by coincidence.
Very interesting posts and well written.
I will put your site on my blogroll.
July 8th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
This very thing happened at a previous place of employment…and after investigation we found that the harassment was so severe that we ended our relationship with this particular vendor. No employee should be subject to harassment whether it be from a fellow employee, a vendor, customer or guest.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:32 am
We are a psychiatric hospital–our customers are psych patients. What about a patient harassing an employee?