Can Customers Legally Harass Your Employees?

In your business, it is likely that you are very aware of, and try to avoid, harassing employees, or even allowing employees to harass each other. You may even (hopefully) have policies dealing with harassment, how to report it, and how it’s investigated.

But when it comes to customers harassing your employees, you may think of that as a “not my problem” problem. After all, you don’t control customers, and you can’t “fire” them. You may even take the approach that harassing and insulting customers are just “part of the job,” and that your employees, if they want to work in your business or industry, need to handle a little customer harassment.

Yes, You Are Responsible

That is actually a false belief; you are legally responsible and can be held liable for customer-on-employee harassment, just as you would be if one employee was harassing another.

But there is one major difference when it comes to customers–to be liable, you do have to know about the harassment, in order to be held liable for it.

This does require you that you have a policy that is known to all employees, that provides an avenue to report customer harassment. It also requires that you act on the complaint–at least, to conduct some kind of investigation. The law also requires that you have some kind of policy, known to employees, about customer harassment.

What Kind of Policies?

Of course, the nature of your customer harassment policy will depend on your business.

Businesses with little or no walk-in from the public foot traffic may not need to worry much at all about such policies; businesses with customers or clients coming in and out routinely may have to worry a bit more about it.

And businesses such as bars and restaurants, where the likelihood of harassment is high, will need to take even more attention. In businesses where physical violence is possible (think alcohol-serving businesses), you may even have an obligation to hire and have present, physical security be they law enforcement or bouncers.

Handling Harassing Events

If your harassed employee needs assistance, whether it’s medical assistance, or help reporting serious customer harassment to law enforcement, you should assist and cooperate with the employee.

Any time you have a reported incident of customer harassment on an employee or you observe it yourself, you will want to fill out an incident report detailing what happened, any witnesses, and other items that should be on an incident report.

Refusing and Removing Customers

Remember that you have a legal right to refuse service to, or to remove, customers from your business for any non-discriminatory reason (which, of course, if they are being harassed, removing customers for that reason would clearly not be discriminating). You do not need to give the customer a reason why, but again, you should always internally document why a customer is being removed.

Need help with legal issues in running your business? We help businesses all the time. Call our Fort Lauderdale business law attorneys at Sweeney Law P.A. at 954-440-3993 for help.

Source:

hourly.io/post/customer-harassesing-an-employee