Customer harassment against LGBTQ workers: highlighting its uniqueness as a group-based customer harassment

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-07-2021-0165
• Published date: 07 September 2022
• Date: 07 September 2022
• Pages: 210-227
• Subject Matter: HR & organizational behaviour,Employment law,Diversity,equality,inclusion
• Author: Koji Ueno,Lacey J. Ritter,Randi Ingram,Taylor M. Jackson,Emily Daina Šaras,Jason V. D'Amours,Jessi Grace

Customer harassment against

LGBTQ workers: highlighting its

uniqueness as a group-based

customer harassment

Koji Ueno

Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, USA

Lacey J. Ritter

Mount Mercy University, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, USA, and

Randi Ingram, Taylor M. Jackson, Emily Daina 

Saras,

Jason V. D’Amours and Jessi Grace

Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, USA

Abstract

Purpose –The authors aimed to identify the nature of customer harassment against lesbian, gay, bisexual,

transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) workers.

Design/methodology/approach –The authors analyzed data from in-depth interviews with 30 LGBTQ

service workers in the United States who had recently experienced customer harassment.

Findings –Among various forms of customer harassment LGBTQ workers reported, some showed

commonalities with previouslyreported cases of race-based and gender-based customer harassment. However,

other cases highlighted unique aspects of LGB TQ-based customer harassment—customers morall y

condemned their LGBTQ identities, refused their service while displaying emotional disgust, and made

sexual advances while imposing sexual stereotypes and fantasies about LGBTQ people. Experiences of

customer harassment varied across subgroups of workers who had specific sexual and gender identities, and

LGBTQ workers of color were harassed for their LGBTQ and racial identities simultaneously.

Originality/value –Past research on group-based customer harassment has focused on incidents against

straight, cisgender women and workers of workers of color, but the present study identified the nature of

customer harassment that targeted workers’LGBTQ status.

Keywords Customer harassment, Gender, LGBTQ, Sexuality, Service work

Paper type Research paper

In service industries, employers seek to increase customer satisfaction by creating a sense of

customer sovereignty, and customers expect workers to keep them in a pleasant mood

(Hochschild, 1983;Korczynski, 2002). When workers are unable to meet these high

expectations, customers may harass the workers as a way to express their frustration.

Scholars call this action customer harassment (McGinley, 2007), customer incivility (Tindell

and Padavic, 2022;Roscigno et al., 2009), or customer abuse (Korczynski and Evans, 2013).

Customer harassment takes various forms, including physical attacks or threats, verbal

abuse, and service refusal. Service workers who belong to lower-status social groups (e.g.

women workers, workers of color) are frequent targets of harassment by customers who

belong to higher-status groups (White customers, men customers) because the status

difference reduces those workers’“status shield”against customer harassment (Hochschild,

1983). Many previous studies on customer harassment have been conducted in the United

States, and our discussions below assume the US context.

Group-based customer harassment operates differently depending on which groups of

workers customers target (Wang, 2016). Past research has focused on customer harassment

EDI

42,2

210

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:

https://www.emerald.com/insight/2040-7149.htm

Received 5 July 2021

Revised 21 May 2022

25 July 2022

Accepted 18 August 2022

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion:

An International Journal

Vol. 42 No. 2, 2023

pp. 210-227

© Emerald Publishing Limited

2040-7149

DOI 10.1108/EDI-07-2021-0165

against women workers and workers of color while assuming that these workers were

straight and cisgender. Consequently, the literature provides limited information about the

nature of customer harassment against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer

(LGBTQ) workers and how LGBTQ status intersects with other dimensions of inequality

such as race. To fill these gaps in the literature, we analyze data from in-depth interviews with

LGBTQ people who held frontline service jobs.

Group-based customer harassment

In group-based customer harassment, customers directly attack workers’group

memberships (Wang, 2016), and past research mostly focused on gender-based or race-

based harassment. Many studies on gender-based harassment described men customers’

harassment against straight, cisgender women workers, and those studies showed that

gender expectations in broader society play a key role. For example, women in care work

often face patient harassment because patients see them as natural caretakers, which inflates

patients’sense of entitlement and devalues women’s service work at the same time (Baines

and Cunningham, 2011). In restaurants, bars, and hotels, men customers frequently harass

women workers sexually by taking advantage of the expectation for casual flirting as a part

of service (Klein et al., 2021;McGinley, 2007).

Research on race-based harassment concentrates on White customers’harassment

against workers of color (Davis, 2016;Williams, 2006; but see Lee, 2002 for an exception). In

the process of harassing workers of color, customers may use racial slurs (Korczynski and

Evans, 2013;Lee, 2002), cause physical harm (Davis, 2016;Williams, 2006), or refuse service

from assigned workers (Nath, 2011;Wingfield, 2019). In some cases, harassment is motivated

by customers’frustration with specific aspects of service. In other cases, however, customers

become frustrated with the fact that workers of color are serving them (Nath, 2011;Wingfield,

2019), partly because customers perceive workers of color as incompetent and believe that

they are not receiving the service to which they are entitled (Nath, 2011;Williams, 2006). In

some cases of race-based customer harassment, motivations do not seem to be related to the

nature of service, and customers take advantage of their sovereignty in service settings to

express their hostility toward workers’racial groups (Davis, 2016;Facey, 1999). In short, past

studies showed that the nature of group-based customer harassment partly depends on

which groups of service workers customers target, and stereotypes and beliefs about the

groups and their histories of oppression in broader society play important roles. We seek to

extend the literature by showing how these points apply to LGBTQ-based customer

harassment.

As we examine LGBTQ-based customer harassment, we also seek to understand how

LGBTQ status operates in tandem with other worker attributes, by drawing on the literature

on intersectionality. Intersectionality refers to a process in which multiple axes of social

inequalities operate jointly to create a complex pattern of oppression (Collins, 1990;

Crenshaw, 1991). In customer harassment, for example, women workers of color frequently

experience unwanted sexual advances from White men customers, who exoticize those

women workers’bodies and assume that those women workers are sexually available to them

(Kensbock et al.,2015;Mulinari, 2017;Wingfield , 2007). Researchers inte rpret this

phenomenon as a persistent consequence of the histories of slavery and colonialism, and it

highlights how gender and race intersect. Similarly, race and class intersect in customer

harassment. For example, Facey (1999) described incidents where White customers from a

higher socioeconomic class made derogatory comments to cab drivers by attributing their

lower socioeconomic status (as indicated by their occupations) to their racial background. In

other words, customers used class to reproduce racial inequality, and they used race to

reproduce class inequality. These studies show that workers face unique forms of customer

Harassment

against

LGBTQ

workers

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