Around 250 former employees of Sterling Jewelers, the multibillion-dollar company that operates Kay Jewelers and Jared the Galleria of Jewelry, report that they endured rampant discrimination and sexual harassment in their time at the company, The Washington Post reported on Monday.
Since 2015, The Washington Post has been seeking documents from a private, class-action arbitration case first brought against Sterling in 2008 by over 12 women who claimed that they had been targets of harassment while working at Sterling. They alleged that during the late 1990s and 2000s, female employees were humiliated, groped, and encouraged to have sex with their superiors in exchange for job security and promotions.
This past Sunday, their attorneys were finally given permission to release their clients' sworn statements. The case is still ongoing, and now 69,000 current and former female employees of Sterling are involved, claiming sexual harassment or abuse, discrimination — many claim a company-wide gender pay gap — or both. Male higher-ups' practice of propositioning women for sex with the promise of professional advancement was so widespread, one former Kay sales associate and manager reported, that one manager gave it its own euphemism: "going to the big stage." "If you didn't do what [the manager] wanted with him," Sanya Douglas said in her 2012 sworn statement, "you wouldn't get your (preferred) store or raise."
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"I didn't like being alone, anywhere. I used to dread going [to meetings]," former Sterling manager Ellen Contaldi told The Washington Post. "If you were even remotely attractive or outgoing, which most salespeople are, you were meat, being shopped."
Because Sterling demands that its employees give up their right to bring suits against the company in public courts, a common practice among U.S. companies, this case is in arbitration, a system outside the legal system in which verdicts are still legally binding and proceedings are confidential — a worrying set-up when systemic problems that could affect current employees are at play. "They're still hiring younger women, and I worry about those women," former Sterling employee Kristin Henry, who reports that she was 22 when a manager attempted to kiss and touch her, told The Washington Post. "I worry about what might happen to them."
