Making Ends Meet in the Margins: Female-Dominated, Low-Wage Sectors

Workers in low-wage, female-dominated industries have the highest reported incidences of sexual harassment and assault by sector. They also contend with low wages, most with little or no benefits, unpredictable schedules, and limited access to social policies like social security or paid sick leave that would enable them to combine work and care responsibilities. They’re frequently left out of anti-discrimination or labor laws. The move by some employers away from hiring full-time employees in favor of independent contractors means many of these low-wage contract workers will neither be covered by employer sexual harassment policies nor have standing under the law to seek legal recourse in the event that they’re sexually harassed. Regardless of their employment status, low-wage workers with jobs that require more time in public spaces such as servers, clothing retail salespeople, and hotel workers—where the majority of women in the labor force are employed—are likely to experience harassment from multiple sources, also known as “third party harassment,” from customers, vendors, and clients.

Low-wage workers are especially vulnerable to sexual harassment depending on their language fluency, ability to access and navigate technology, immigration status, and when other parts of the their lives such as housing, transportation, or legal status are tied to employment. Women of color and immigrant women are over-represented in low-wage work, accounting for nearly six in 10 of the more than 26 million workers who typically earn less than $11 an hour, and are often managed by or work for men, be it in a restaurant, hotel, or retail establishment.

Across low-wage, female-dominated work sectors, common factors leave workers vulnerable and contribute to or exacerbate sexual harassment in these fields. In particular, women who work in these settings are often isolated, or work for a subminimum wage and rely on tips, and therefore are forced to please customers, even if that means tolerating or remaining silent about sexual harassment, in order to make ends meet.

On the face of it, some low-wage industries, such as retail, seem more gender-equal than they are, simply because of the balance of men and women in them. But breaking down the industry data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals what researchers call vertical segregation, in which men occupy higher status jobs within the industry, while women are concentrated in lower-status jobs in the same sector. For instance 72 percent of cashiers are women while 57 percent of their supervisors are men. As the section of this report on high-wage, female-dominated jobs will describe in greater detail, being segregated in lower wage work, while managed by men, creates room for abuses of power and difficulties in contesting and reporting harassment.

Tipped Work

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 60 percent of food preparation and service workers, 70 percent of waitresses, 86 percent of hostesses, and 88 percent of maids and housekeepers are women. Analysis of EEOC data found that between 2005 and 2015, accommodation and food services (“full-service restaurants, fast-food restaurants, coffee shops, recreational facilities, inns, hotels, and other hospitality establishments”) account for the greatest share of claims to the commission at 14 percent. Other research by Hart Research Associates suggests 40 percent of fast food workers have experienced harassment, and the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC) United reports that 60 percent of women in the restaurant industry have been targets of sexual harassment, and more than half say they experience it every week. Just as troubling is that working conditions set a precedent early on for many young Americans about what to expect from their workplace. The first job of one in three Americans is in food service, and one in two will work in a restaurant at some point in their life.

Workers in low-wage, female-dominated industries have the highest reported incidences of sexual harassment and assault by sector.

While the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) established a federal minimum wage, many industries such as retail, service, and tipped work, among others, were initially excluded from the law and follow a “sub-”, or tipped, minimum wage. Today, anyone who earns at least $30 per month in tips can be considered a tipped worker, be they a massage therapist, hairdresser, waiter, or airport attendant pushing the elderly and disabled to their gates. In theory, employers are required to ensure their workers earn at least the federal minimum wage ($7.25 an hour) by making up the amount not covered by tips, but the U.S. Department of Labor reports widespread noncompliance with these rules, and enforcement is lax.

Tipped workers who earn the federal subminimum wage of $2.13 an hour are twice as likely to experience harassment. According to ROC United, the seven states (Alaska, California, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington) that got rid of the subminimum wage system have seen half the rates of sexual harassment as states that have retained a subminimum wage. Because their already precarious livelihood depends on tips, it makes it that much more difficult for tipped employees to react to, and/or report sexual harassment. As a result, workers in customer-facing jobs such as food service, accommodation, and retail contend with normalized harassment from customers, coworkers, and managers. This glass floor, a term coined by ROC United to describe workplaces that leave “workers in a state of insecurity because of the intersection of economic precariousness and a sexualized work atmosphere,” forces workers to “curry favor” for a living.

Murky Reporting Policies, Lack of Benefits

Many low-wage workplaces are too small to have reporting structures for sexual harassment, or a human resources department. Even if these mechanisms exist, as is the case in many retail jobs, murky policies and unclear reporting structures make it difficult to report and contest harassment. Moreover, in addition to the aforementioned lack of harassment protections when labeled as independent contractors or when working for small employers, many low-wage workers are excluded from other social policy benefits such as the Social Security Act, so they have little or no financial cushion in case of disability or need to retire, making it difficult to leave a job or complain about a supervisor for any reason, including sexual harassment.

Isolation and Difficult Working Conditions

Domestic workers such as home health aides, nannies, and housekeepers also work in isolation (in client’s homes), making them potentially more vulnerable to sexual harassment. These workers are employed in the most female-dominated of all professions—94 percent of childcare workers and 89 percent of home health aides are female—and among the lowest paid. While little is known definitively about the prevalence of sexual harassment in care work, research from the National Domestic Workers Alliance and University of Illinois at Chicago found “Thirty-six percent of live-in workers report that they were verbally harassed in the past 12 months, and many others have been threatened, subjected to racial slurs, or sexually abused.”

One union survey of 500 hospitality workers in Chicago, Hands Off, Pants On, found that nearly 60 percent of hotel workers said they’d been sexually harassed by guests. Nearly half of the hotel housekeepers surveyed—who often work alone cleaning rooms—said guests had flashed them or opened doors while naked.

Because their livelihood depends on tips, it makes it that much more difficult for tipped employees to react to, and/or report sexual harassment.

Taxing Physical Demands and Danger

The speed and physicality of many low-wage jobs, such as in janitorial and hospitality work, also affects how workers react to harassment. According to Abby Lawlor of the Unite Here! Local 8 union in Seattle, the physicality of work and physical experience of stress in these roles makes it difficult for workers to process and report an experience of sexual harassment. Low-wage work in hospitality, for example, is associated with higher injury rates than coal miners. Pain workers already might be experiencing due to their job, lack of time, and exhaustion, as well as pressure to finish their work, and provide for their families, may inhibit some workers from reporting sexual harassment.

Legal Status

Both documented and undocumented immigrants tend to be a large portion of the low-wage workforce because the low wages, poor working conditions, and lack of benefits make the jobs unattractive to more upwardly mobile, U.S.-born workers. In addition, much low-wage work is under-regulated, making it easier for employers to hire the “cheapest” immigrant workers whose status makes it difficult to contest wages, harassment, and other negative experiences on the job. Although technically protected under Title VII of the Civil Rights Law, many workers may fear putting their immigration status at risk if they report sexual and other instances of harassment, abuse, or other crimes in what Human Rights Watch calls “the crosshairs of harsh immigration laws and exploitive industries.”

For instance, in the case of EEOC v. DeCoster, the EEOC found sexual harassment up to and including repeated rape, discrimination on the basis of national (Mexican and Guatemalan) origin, and threat of retaliation against 11 women in an Iowa egg processing plant. The DeCoster Iowa Egg Farm is the fifth largest producer of eggs in the U.S., and the case came to light as one woman seeking permanent legal status confided to her attorney: “I want help maybe because I’m tired of having sex at work.” Garment and manufacturing jobs dating back to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire have long been associated with health, safety, and wage theft violations, and sexual harassment is becoming an increasingly visible addition to that list.

Similarly, U.S. garment work has been on the rise as people in the U.S. fashion industry seek greater control over clothing production, especially in and around New York City and Los Angeles. The garment industry is heavily female, with women dominating the ranks of sewing machine operators (73 percent), tailors, dressmakers, and sewers (76 percent), as well as people who clean clothes in the laundry and dry-cleaning industry. Research by Verite suggests that workshops and factories compete for sub-contracted, price-fixed work on small profit margins, so they often employ undocumented women as a way to suppress wages.

Many may fear putting their immigration status at risk if they report sexual and other instances of harassment.

Though not considered tipped workers, garment workers paid by the piece of clothing sewn (“piece rate”) often earn under the minimum wage. They are economically vulnerable, as they must work fast enough to make quotas, to such an extent that it makes it extremely difficult leave their job out of a basic need to survive, not to mention to avoid deportation if they’ve been trafficked into the U.S., or if a coworker threatens to report their undocumented status as retaliation. While the U.S. data on sexual harassment rates in garment work is scant, a Human Rights Watch investigation has documented rampant sexual harassment in factories in Cambodia, Bangladesh, Burma, and Pakistan.

There are other ways immigration regulations can make some workers more vulnerable to harassment and abuse. Under the Secure Communities Program, in effect since 2013, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will apprehend, document, and deport undocumented persons, even if they’ve been the victim of a crime, or reporting one. While in theory, victims of sexual violence should have access to asylum under the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) U Visa program, access to the visa is contingent on law enforcement agencies asking whether the victim in question has experienced sexual violence and assisting them in the application process. There are only 10,000 U-Visas given each year, though applications for visas far exceed the limit. As a result, an undocumented person reporting a crime and not offered the opportunity to apply for a U Visa could be incarcerated with the perpetrator in an immigration detention center. Or, as recent reporting by the Intercept and the Lily found, the victim could experience additional sexual harassment and abuse by ICE while in detention. There are few prosecutions at this intersection of civil rights and immigration law. Because legally, federal funding can’t go to undocumented immigrants, these individuals often don’t have access to legal representation and face higher rates of language and technical barriers (such as online filing requirements). Nonetheless, the DeCoster case was the first to apply the U Visa status to sexual violence at work for undocumented immigrants, and in the Holiday Inn Express case, the EEOC also ruled that alerting the authorities to the undocumented status of its workers is a form of illegal retaliation. In a rare case, the EEOC and private counsel won more than $1 million in back pay, emotional distress, and punitive damages for Olivia Tamayo, a Mexican immigrant who was repeatedly raped and intimidated during her work for Harris Farms in California’s Central Valley.

Racial Inequality

Most low-wage workers are female, and low wage work in general is often more specifically dominated by women of color. A 2016 EEOC Select Task Force study of sexual harassment found that “when the target of harassment is both a member of a racial minority group and a woman, the individual is more likely to experience higher rates of harassment than white women,” white men, and non-white men. Research suggests that consumers discriminate against black service providers by paying them less in tips, another factor that could lead workers to stay silent in the face of sexual harassment for fear of further endangering their economic livelihood.

And because low-wage jobs are dominated by women, and particularly women of color, they can also be targets of what researchers call sexual racism—simultaneous race and gender discrimination that takes the form of sexual aggression that often “perpetuates stereotypes about particular genders in particular ethnic groups.” In other words, sexual harassment isn't something that just happens because of fleeting circumstance or desire. It has roots in systemic relationships of wages and power, which includes race and racism. The legacies of slavery and U.S. colonialism have perpetuated the idea that those who are more powerful can forcefully take ownership of another's land or body, meaning women of color often face particularly high rates of hypersexualization and gender-based violence, which they are especially vulnerable to in the context of sometimes isolating, intense, low-wage work.