Teenage Sexual Harassment in the Workplace

For millions of teenagers working in the American workforce, being sexually harassed is not an uncommon occurrence in their daily work environment. Unfortunately, teenagers in the workforce become particularly vulnerable to acts of harassment because they lack awareness about their rights as an employee and do not have enough work experience or maturity to address situations that arise in the work environment. These teenagers are usually part-time workers, overlooked for training, view their supervisors as having the ultimate authority over their job, and are more likely to be unaware of harassment policies than other workers within the workforce. Despite all of these factors, more and more organizations in industries like retail (i.e. Kmart), entertainment (i.e. movie theatres), and food services (i.e. McDonalds) to be specific, have turned to teenagers as a key source of labor. In doing so, these organizations have exposed themselves to the liability of protecting the youth that they employ and must take even greater measures to prevent these teenagers from being subjected to a hostile work environment.
Where these organizations fail to protect the youth that they employ, the federal (and State) government, by way of passing labor laws and through the administration of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), attempts to ensure that teens are fairly educated and represented if such a hostile work environment occurs. It is through the EEOC’s guardianship that the government has recognized as well as acknowledged a need to protect teenagers from harassment in the workplace and have more recently been active in taking action against organizations that fail to do so. Despite these efforts, an increasing number of organizations continue to employ teenagers and have either learned to adopt rules to regulate their work environment or have allowed such hostile work environments to further exist without the fear of punishment or consequence. As a