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Restaurant Industry Struggles With Harrassment, Many Workers Say

The restaurant and food industry in Virginia is huge, making up one in every ten jobs and bringing in nearly $17 billion annually, according to the National Restaurant Association. But, as the Me Too movement has taken hold, so have women’s voices. From Roanoke to Richmond, people working in the industry say sexual harassment is common.

Selima Dougidir was raised in Charlottesville. She’s 26, and since she was a teenager, she’s worked in restaurants.

“I like a lot of parts of it,” she says. “I like the teamwork. It’s all teamwork, if you’re working in the kitchen, if you’re working on the floor, if you have a good team, and you see things go right, and you see the night go smoothly, it feels so good."

With about 500 eateries, the Charlottesville area has one of the highest concentrations of restaurants in the country. The city depends on them, for tourists and locals alike. The meals tax brings in nearly $12 million. And there are great things about restaurants here. But there’s a dark side too, that often gets overlooked, ignored.

“The word ‘slut’ was used a lot, just in general, just to refer to a female working in the restaurant, just that was their name, that’s what they got called so, things like that, experienced that on a pretty daily basis, and then started to become fairly numb to it, because it was accepted in this industry and you just don’t say anything,” says Lorraine Rees, 38, who works in restaurant management.

And if women do say something?

“Even then, saying that, somebody might stop their behavior to your face but it tended to escalate behind the scenes. So I saw that happen to quite a few people, and it was really — they ended up quitting their jobs because they’re being harassed so badly. So you learned to stay silent and unfortunately not stick up for other people who were being abused,” she says.

Rees and Dougadir don’t know each other, but their stories mirror those of a half-dozen other women who spoke on-background, afraid they might lose work if they spoke on the record. Women get fired, blacklisted, labeled troublesome or crazy. And the harassment continues.

Dougadir recalls one boss. "He told me, ‘I hired you because you’re cute but then I found out that you actually work really hard.’ If my shirt had fallen to the side, he would pick it up for me and say, ‘Don’t do that you’re driving me crazy.’”

The back of the house can be bad, but…”I have not been nearly harassed by other people working in a restaurant as I have by the guest,” says Rees.

Male customers touch their backs, waists, shoulders, their hands. And it’s tethered to this notion that the customer is always right.

“There is that fear that if I’m not nice or I am not courteous about you touching my body, which I hate, then I won’t get paid for this work that I’ve done. And I think that a lot of us have accepted that it’s part of the job,” says Dougadir.

This is one of the strongest arguments to end tipping. Servers typically earn $2.13 an hour, and tips make up the rest.

“So it’s, I think it’s definitely a power play, a lot of times too, the things that I’ve seen usually men do,” says Rees. “It’s all about, ‘Well you don’t know if I’m going to tip you or not, so I could give you a $50 tip for putting up with me, or I could give you $0 and grab your butt.”

Rees and Dougadir say there are plenty of good men in the industry too, but they hope more women will come forward with their experiences. Every woman has at least one, they say.

“In my experience, being the one who was being harassed, if anybody had ever said, ‘Look I’ve got your back, that’s wrong.’ Or said to that person, ‘Knock it off, this is terrible.’ It would’ve changed my life. There are some places that I might have continued to work if that had not been part of the environment,” says Rees.

“Women have been doing this amongst themselves forever, but if we can now come forward and say, ‘Hey men, this is what you’re doing to us, here are all of these instances, they may not all be the same, but they all hurt us in some way.’ The more we can do that, the more we’ll move forward,” says Dougadir.

“I think that change will come, it’s just going to take a long time,” says Rees.

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