“I couldn’t believe it was happening in Florida, too,” she said. “I couldn’t fathom that such a large corporation would do that in this day and age and get away with it.”

Image A Kay Jewelers in Gadsden, Ala. The women are seeking class action status for their case. Credit... Sarah Dudik/Gadsden Times

Sterling, based in Akron, Ohio, has 1,400 stores in 50 states and is a subsidiary of Signet Jewelers, which is based in Bermuda and has 500 stores in Britain. Signet agreed last month to purchase the rival jewelry chain Zale.

Since 1998, Sterling has required employees to agree to take disputes to private arbitration as a condition of employment. Companies are increasingly demanding that employees agree to arbitration, said Cliff Palefsky, an employment lawyer in San Francisco. More recently, firms are including clauses that prohibit bringing class-action complaints to arbitration, he said.

“In the old days, arbitration clauses said nothing about class actions,” he said. “Now companies are jumping on the bandwagon.”

Sterling employees can get to arbitration only after they have filed a claim with its in-house resolution program. It received 474 complaints from 1998 to 2010. In that time, according to plaintiffs’ legal filings, only two moved to an arbitration decision.

In their complaint, the plaintiffs said that grievances about pay and harassment were not taken seriously. Ms. Souto-Coons said in an interview that her boss once asked her to write out a complaint for the company about sexual harassment of women in the store by a male employee, but two days later, she learned the report had been watered down. Two weeks later, the man was promoted, she said.

Beyond the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission inquiry, the civil rights division of the Department of Law and Public Safety in New Jersey found in 2009 probable cause of discrimination at Sterling after a sales associate complained that a manager had rubbed up against her. Another employee told similar stories to company officials. Sterling told investigators that it had not been able to corroborate the allegations. But the state examined company officials’ notes, and concluded that they “knew or should have known” about the harassment and that the company’s harassment policies were ineffective.