Court filing details two years of harassment, discrimination at Ezell’s Famous Chicken Bellevue location
Lawsuit underscores widespread crisis of sexual harassment and discrimination in the restaurant industry
A worker at Ezell’s Famous Chicken has filed a lawsuit in King County Superior Court alleging she was sexually harassed and assaulted while at work.
For two years, the worker’s supervisor, the General Manager of the Bellevue Ezell’s Famous Chicken location, engaged in an escalating pattern of harassment, assault, and intimidation. Meanwhile, corporate management at Ezell’s failed to provide sexual harassment policies or training in Spanish or any way for this worker to report the General Manager’s sexual harassment to upper management at the company without fearing for her job.
The full court filing is available here. Specific allegations raised in the complaint include:
Sexual harrassment and assault: the store’s General Manager engaged in an escalating pattern of unwanted sexual behavior, including many instances where he made sexually-explicit and derogatory verbal comments to her, touched the worker’s body without her permission, and an occasion where he groped her body while after trapping her in a walk-in freezer.
Corporate responsibility: Management at this Ezell’s location provided no sexual harassment training in Spanish, nor did they offer any procedure for workers to bring forth complaints about sexual harassment or other mistreatment
More information:
Sexual harassment is a widespread crisis facing workers in the restaurant industry. A 2021 study from the University of California Berkeley found that 71% of women restaurant workers had been sexually harassed on the job.
Immigrant women workers are particularly likely to face sexual harassment and assault at work, as a recent report from the Southern Poverty Law Center highlights.
These allegations are the latest in a string of notable Seattle-area restaurant sexual harassment cases.
Ezell’s Famous Chicken currently operates 17 locations in the region.
The worker is represented by attorneys at Fair Work Center and Frank Freed Subit & Thomas, LLP.
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Contact Jeffrey Gustaveson: jeffrey@workingwa.org
Working Washington is the voice for workers in our state. Working Washington fast food strikers sparked the fight that won Seattle’s first-in-the-nation $15 minimum wage. Working Washington baristas and fast food workers led the successful campaign for secure scheduling in Seattle, and our members across the state helped drive forward Initiative 1433 to raise the minimum wage and provide paid sick days. We successfully drove Amazon to sever ties with the right-wing lobby group ALEC and improve conditions in their sweatshop warehouses, and got Starbucks to address inequities in their corporate parental leave policy. And we've continued to make history by organizing for the landmark statewide paid family leave law in 2017, winning the groundbreaking Seattle Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in summer 2018, leading the fight to restore overtime protections to salaried workers in 2019, and passing the nation's first hazard pay and paid sick days laws for gig workers. For more information, visit workingWA.org.