After reading the attached Color Time Painting case study, what do you think...
Is Rachel being harassed?
Does the owner of Color Time Painting have any liability if Rachel files a legal complaint against Eric?
What advice would you give Eric?
Color Time Painting Color Time Painting recently hired Rachel for their west-side painting crew. Eric, crew supervisor for Color Time, had never hired a woman painter before; but Rachel had lots of experience and came highly recommended from another paint contractor. Eric decided to give her a try. After all, gender discrimination is illegal, isn't it? Unfortunately, it has only been a few weeks and some of the men are already complaining about her. They say she doesn't pull her weight. She won't go up the ladders to paint the high spots; she won't help unload the paint; and she doesn't clean up at the end of the day. "Besides," one of them said, "I got no problem working with women, but she's a lousy painter!" Rachel has complained to Eric that the men refuse to work with her. "How am I supposed to know which job we're working on," she said, "when they won't give me the day's schedule? Everyone else gets it the day before and I don't get it at all. When we get to the job, my paint is always loaded at the back of the truck under all the five-gallon buckets so I struggle to get it unloaded while they all stand around and snicker, making cracks about a woman in a man's job. Worse yet, yesterday when I went to get my lunch cooler from the back, someone had written GO HOME on the side of it with a black permanent marker! You've got to do something, Eric, I'm tired of the harassment and their abuse." Eric groaned silently to himself. "I should have known better than to hire a woman," he thought. "What a mess. Now I have to let Rachel go, and I'm never going to hire another woman. The paint industry is just no place for women."