An arbitrator has awarded a former Avon Menards employee more than $342,000 for lost pay, emotional distress and punitive damages in her lawsuit alleging the home improvement store ignored escalating sexual harassment from a customer that forced her to leave her job.
The employee, who started as a part-time cashier at a Menards in Avon in 2019 when she was 18, was harassed and threatened by a customer in April and May of 2020.
Although she reported incidents to higher-ups, the employee said the company failed to take action. Throughout the ordeal, the customer reportedly told her, “I’m going to come back to see you at the same time every day,” and, “If not for the six-foot rule, I’d be all over that,” referencing Covid-19 social distancing protocols. But despite these protocols, he did get within six feet of the employee, touching her arm.
The customer also told her he would “lay his hammer” on her, that “he’d love to stalk her,” and that he was “going to take her out and do whatever he wanted to her, whether she liked it or not,” and threatened to use a gun in incidents speaking with other employees, according to the arbitration verdict. He also appeared to have known and memorized the employee’s schedule.
“It is my determination that [the employee] has met her burden and established that the harassment was sufficiently severe and pervasive to alter the conditions of her employment and created an abusive working environment,” wrote arbitrator Peggy Foley Jones.
Despite the customer’s escalating and distressing pattern of behavior, the employee says Menard, Inc. failed to take adequate steps to protect her.
After one encounter with him, the employee asked a coworker to call the police. But when she went to write a statement for the police, she says the store’s general manager sent her to the Garden Center, an area she’d never worked before. Because of this, the employee felt her manager was trying to interfere with her talking to the police.
In a different incident, another employee asked management to pursue a trespassing charge against the customer, but the general manager “would not because [he] was a good customer and spent a lot of money in the store,” according to the arbitration ruling.
The same employee asked management to call the police but was told they couldn't, leading him to call the police and make a report himself. After multiple incidents with the store, police recommended Menards make a trespassing complaint against the customer if he persisted.
Unsurprisingly, the employee targeted by him, “felt that Menards would rather lose an employee than lose a customer who spends a lot of money in the store.”
Although the company claimed it wasn’t aware of the allegations for weeks and that the targeted employee failed to personally make management aware of her complaints, the arbitrator sided with the employee, writing that Menards, Inc. knew or should have known about the harassment earlier and launched an investigation sooner.
According to Foley Jones, it “does not seem credible or reasonable that…the top managers at the store, were not aware of the police coming to their store or what information was disclosed in those police reports.”
After leaving her job in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic for fear of her safety, the employee struggled to find work and left another job nearby out of concern that the customer would find her there. Based on salary projections, the arbitrator determined that, in addition to back-pay losses, the employee would be making more money had she been able to stay at Menards than she does at her current job, making her eligible for front-pay as well.
‘Menards violated its own policy by not documenting interviews with witnesses, failing to timely follow up with [the employee] after she was asked to provide a written statement, failing to inform HR about the investigation, and failing to file a final report of the investigation…[the employee] was upset and isolated, but Menards never assured her of her safety or protection,” Foley Jones wrote.
“Additionally, they did not trespass [the customer], which was appropriate based on past experience, their own policy and based on the recommendation of the Avon Police Department. Beyond factors such as reckless indifference and malice, punitive damages may be predicated upon showing that the employer lied and covered up the discrimination.”
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