CALGARY— Standing five-foot-three “on a great day,” Dakota Fancey is well aware of the challenges of being a slender and petite woman in the hospitality industry.

However, her appearance has led to many unwelcome comments from customers over her four years in the sector.

Fancey remembers when a couple she served asked her how much she weighed.

The man told her that he and his wife had placed a wager, so he wanted to know.

“I told them how much I weighed and I think I sort of laughed it off at the time,” she said.

“It was more just shock than anything, but I just started to toughen up to it.”

Whether it comes from co-workers, management or customers, restaurants can be a breeding ground for inappropriate behaviour. And while fear of losing their jobs appears to be stopping many workers from reporting incidents, sexual harassment in the workplace is a dark reality that has to be faced.

Over the past five years, there has been a consistent trend of gender-based complaints, accounting for 18 to 20 per cent of all complaints being filed with the Alberta Human Rights Commission, according to its yearly reports.

Sarah Coderre, an Alberta employment-standards lawyer in Calgary, said she wouldn’t be surprised to see an influx in harassment claims in the next few years due to the attention the #MeToo movement has gained.

“When you think of the service industry… those workers put up with a lot of harassment, not just from customers, but from managers. I think a lot of people just chalk it up to ‘Well, that’s the industry, it’s acceptable’ — but it’s not acceptable.”

While not every day in the life of a hospitality worker is filled with groping and inappropriate comments, their livelihoods can depend on the ability to grin and bear it.

“As servers, we put up with so much because our wage literally depends on it,” said law student and server Cassandra Sawers.

“Some guests take our kindness as sexual interest and it’s honestly sickening sometimes.”

In a survey conducted by Insights West on sexual harassment in the workplace, half of working women in Canada said they have experienced either “significant, moderate or a small amount” in their careers.

However, only 22 per cent of those women said they reported it to a superior or a human resources department.

Fancey speculates that it’s the initial shock of such an incident that prevents servers from telling management the moment something happens, and after the fact, it becomes internally minimized.

“I think it’s just become like a norm, a normal thing for us to do, to brush things off, to underplay, minimize the damage done,” she said.

Nathalia Cortes said while working at a local bar last Stampede, an obviously inebriated patron asked to touch her breasts.

She knew the man as a regular at her other serving job.

“Even after I said that wasn’t OK, he continued to do grabby hands at me every time I walked by,” she said. “Thinking back, I should’ve said something, but I don’t know why I hesitated.”

While this is a reality mainly faced by female hospitality workers, it doesn’t mean it’s not happening to men.

Jon McKay had a woman grab his butt while serving a bachelorette party years ago.

He didn’t tell management about the incident, but said he most likely told his co-workers.

Even when incidents of harassment are reported to management immediately, not all bosses are helpful.

“I had a customer who would come in multiple times a week, buy minimal food and drink and insist to sit in my section,” said Alana Brunka, a former waitress and bartender.

She said this customer would consistently make comments that would leave her feeling uncomfortable.

“It got to the point where I would avoid him. Eventually, I approached my manager, who basically said I had to deal with it because I was the only day bartender and he ‘hadn’t broken any laws,’” said Brunka.

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Right now in Alberta, it is not mandatory for human resources departments at workplaces to have a policy to deal with harassment. In fact, no company is obligated to even have an HR department.

“Whether or not a company has an HR department is really just a matter of corporate organization and preference,” said Coderre, the employment lawyer.

In November 2016, Calgary NDP MLA Craig Coolahan proposed Bill 208, which would introduce mandatory workplace harassment policies for every industry.

Unfortunately, Bill 208 died after its first reading.

It did, however, get taken into consideration when Alberta’s Labour Minister Christina Gray proposed Bill 30 just over a year ago.

Called “An Act to Protect The Health and Well-Being of Working Albertans,” it will go into effect June 1.

The act “includes a strengthened definition of harassment that finally includes sexual harassment, sexual solicitation, as well as new workplace protections for domestic and sexual violence,” said Gray in a statement to StarMetro Calgary.

“These changes were long overdue,” she said.” Legislation protecting Albertans from harassment and violence in the workplace has been unaddressed by the previous government for over a decade.”

The Alberta Human Rights Commission encourages all employees to notify management when harassment occurs, because the responsibility is on an employer to protect employees. If nothing is done, employees have the option to file a complaint.

Of the women who said they didn’t report incidents of sexual harassment in the Insights West survey, 41 per cent said they didn’t think it was a big enough deal to bother and 34 per cent said they thought they would be perceived as troublemakers.

“Any sort of niche industry where it’s a small group of people and everyone sort of knows each other… it can be difficult to speak out because of that,” Coderre said.

She agrees getting “blacklisted” from an industry can be quite common, but difficult to prove and enforce.

The Calgary Sexual Health Centre (CSHC) launched an anti-harassment initiative called #CalgaryGetsConsent last year, and has been providing workplace harassment training since 2014.

“Since that time, we trained over 2,500 people to respond to sexual harassment in the workplace,” said Becky Van Tassel, CSHC training centre manager.

Van Tassel says it is always companies reaching out to CSHC for the workshops, rather than vice versa.

Although she has taken almost a year off from the industry, Fancey plans to return.

“The very fact that I’m thinking about going back to serving… sort of proof in the pudding there that, without thinking about it further, I was willing to put up with it.”

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