When Charlotte worked for a large pub chain in central London, workplace sexual harassment was so widespread that she describes it as “continuous”. Incidents that particularly stand out, she says, include being asked by a customer to give him a blow job, being groped by a customer while carrying plates of food past their table and being asked to go to a hotel by a man who tipped £20 during the course of the evening.

The impact on her mental health was enormous. “It made me feel unsafe and miserable and it made going to work extremely difficult.” At one point, she says: “I broke down and had to go home to my parents for two weeks because I couldn’t do it any more.”

Working on a zero-hours contract made Charlotte feel unable to report what was happening, due to “a low-level fear that making too much fuss would reduce my hours when I was already struggling to support myself”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Lots of customers feel the transaction for a pint includes the right to make sexual comments or to try to feel you up ... ’ Photograph: Bloomberg

Faye was a carer working on a zero-hours contract at a learning disability care home when a co-worker unexpectedly showed her photographs of his erect penis. She, too, felt pressured to put up with the sexual harassment because of the instability of her contract. “I absolutely did not feel able to protest or report. The guy had been working there longer than me and I felt that if I had reported it, I would be at risk of not receiving any more shifts.”

Another woman, who asked to remain anonymous, worked at a five-star hotel and golf resort. While experiencing frequent unwanted touching and groping from customers, she was pressured by managers to accept the behaviour to keep wealthy regular clients happy. “We were constantly told to ‘look after the important customers’: and [they] were pointed out to us by our managers – these were the richest or most-famous customers, of course.”

The power imbalance manifested itself in class prejudice as well. One “important customer” would make comments about her accent and the fact that she had not been to university. She felt that “his power came from his wealth and he was determined to exploit it in any way he could”. It meant that she had few options to tackle his behaviour. “One evening, [he] asked me to sit on his lap, but I wasn’t in the mood to play along with his game. I could see this annoyed him. The next day I was called into the office because he’d complained about me. He told my manager that I’d embarrassed him in front of some important clients. I was reprimanded but couldn’t bring myself to say what had happened. I didn’t want to lose my job as I’d only been there a few months, I had no savings and nowhere else to go.”

When the Everyday Sexism Project and the TUC surveyed women in 2016, the results revealed that more than half of women had experienced workplace sexual harassment. But that figure leapt to 67% for women in hospitality and leisure. Our report’s recommendations to the government included reinstating Equality Act provisions to protect employees from third-party harassment and extending the full range of statutory employment rights to all workers, regardless of employment status or type of contract. There remains an urgent need to reform the law on employment status and continuity of employment so that those on zero-hours or casual contracts do not lose out on basic rights at work, including protection from unfair dismissal. At the time of the report’s publication, a government spokesman told the Guardian: “No one should experience harassment or abuse of any kind in the workplace – the law on this is very clear and employers must take swift action to tackle this issue. Section 40 has not been scrapped and any employee who experiences harassment is protected by the Equality Act – regardless of who the perpetrator is.”

Last year, however, a ComRes survey of over 6,000 adults (men and women) found that people employed by an organisation were significantly less likely (29%) to have suffered unwelcome sexual behaviour at work than people engaged as freelancers, gig workers or on zero-hours contracts (43%).

Pippa and Stephanie both worked as waitresses on zero-hours contracts. Stephanie describes being “touched up, backed into corners, fondled and followed … We often had huge tables of businessmen come in and I would be assigned by my boss to ‘look after them’ for the night. I remember one man put £100 down my top as my ‘tip’.” Stephanie didn’t feel able to protest: “The general feel of the workplace was disorganised and chaotic; no supervisions, no contracts, it was cash in hand. So I wasn’t protected at all.”

For Pippa, sexual harassment started with “jokey” comments from an older member of staff and progressed to him touching her waist and hips. One day he graphically described her breasts in front of another member of staff. “I finished my shift with my hands still shaking,” she says. But she felt she had little recourse for dealing with the sexual harassment. “I was scared I would not be believed and that I would lose those precious work hours … The zero hours meant that I could be dropped with no warning and the member of staff in question has a permanent contract. I had no union representation and had no idea about the help they could have given me.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘We were constantly told to “look after the important customers” ... ’ Photograph: Alamy

The impact of workplace sexual harassment is ongoing and severe. “I was told it was part of the job,” says Charlotte, who stopped working in the pub some years ago. “It made me physically sick to walk through those doors at times, I felt complicit in the harassment by staying in the job.” Pippa says she still smells the perpetrator’s aftershave if someone touches her unexpectedly. So great is the fear about speaking out that the women interviewed for this article asked for only their first names to be used.

Recent revelations about sexual harassment in Hollywood, Westminster and elsewhere have triggered vital conversations about women’s right to respect and safety at work. But it is important that the spotlight drawn by the voices of high-profile women also penetrates deeper, to the plight of women in less glamorous jobs, particularly those made doubly vulnerable by precarious working conditions, who are often even less able to share their stories.

“Customers ‘pay your wages’, so lots of them feel that the transaction for a pint of Fosters includes the right to make sexual comments or to try to feel you up,” says Charlotte. “While it’s been devastating to hear about the scale of abuse in politics and the creative industries, I think it’s important to make it clear that sexual harassment happens everywhere there’s a power differential.”

And, until the law changes, Charlotte and others like her will likely continue to feel pressured to see sexual harassment as “just part of the job”.