The Zaxby’s restaurant chain opened its first location in Statesboro, Georgia in March 1990, and though primarily based in the southern United States they have grown to 900 locations with thousands of employees. They have expanded west to Texas and north into Virginia. Their biggest market is Atlanta with 60 locations.
Given the level of training required to keep an operation like Zaxby’s afloat, both franchisee’s and corporate-owned properties, we would believe that sexual harassment training should be required and reinforced. Unfortunately, one location in Greensboro, North Carolina did not feel the training was all that important.
General Manager and the Cashier
In Greensboro, the Zaxby’s cashier claims she was fired after making a sexual harassment claim against the general manager. She claimed that he (was) “sexually harassing her on a daily or almost daily basis,” according to a report filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and that the general manager had created a hostile work environment.
In turn, the commission is suing BCD Restaurants, which is the owner of the North Carolina-based Zaxby’s franchisee.
The cashier worked at the franchise from November 2018 to Jan. 25, 2019. The lawsuit alleges that the “general manager made ‘sexually inappropriate comments and requests for sexual relations’ to her almost daily, if not every day.”
The cashier stood up for herself and complained to one of the owners of BCD Restaurants. She was fired within days.
According to EEOC Regional Attorney Lynette Barnes:
“A company’s ability to provide a work environment free of harassment is dependent on its employees being able to report this sort of abuse without hesitation. Every time an employee complaint about harassment leads to discharge, the entire work environment is placed at risk.”
The Ultimate Penalty
The ultimate penalty, in this case, is not the thousands of dollars in fines that will be imposed on BCD Restaurants for a violation of the Civil Rights Act, even though the lawsuit will seek “back pay, compensatory and punitive damages and an injunction to prevent any possible future harassment or retaliation.”
The real penalty is that Zaxby’s restaurants, all 900 of them, has been elevated into the national spotlight not for the quality of its food, but for the absolutely unethical and inappropriate behavior of a general manager. Further, it reflects on the ownership of a franchise who, in listening to a sexual harassment claim, went after the harasser and not the person who was being harassed. It is the ultimate denial.
Whether you agree with them or not, Chick-Fil-A restaurants once took a stance based on the religious beliefs of its ownership and has paid a price in terms of negative publicity. The Zaxby’s case could be proven to be far more offensive. While most of us might agree that religious views are a personal choice, almost none of us would support a general manager continually asking one of his employees for sexual favors.
The manager felt empowered (and frankly, so did the ownership) and they viewed the cashier as being weak and without a voice. They might have found any number of ways to rationalize their behavior – and may have even characterized the cashier as a trouble-maker, and not a team player, but in the end, she was right to report and they were wrong to handle the complaint in the way they did.
It is not possible to calculate the dollar value of the negative publicity. The story has made national news and is all over the internet. Whatever the value, it is far, far more than the cost of sexual harassment awareness training.
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