According to the arbitration documents obtained by The Washington Post, hundreds of former employees of the jewelry giant Sterling Jewelers, a multibillion-dollar conglomerate behind Jared the Galleria Jewelry and Kay Jewelers, claim that its CEO and also the other company leaders presided over a corporate culture that fostered rampant sexual harassment and discrimination.
Declarations from roughly 250 women and men who worked at the Sterling, filed as part of the private class-action arbitration case, the female employees at the company alleged that throughout the late 1990s and 2000s they were routinely groped, demeaned and urged to sexually cater to their bosses in order to stay employed. Sterling disputes the filed allegations.
The arbitration was first filed in the year 2008 by more than a dozen women who accused the company of widespread gender discrimination. The class action case, still unresolved, now includes 69,000 women who are current and former employees of the Sterling, which operates about 1,500 stores across the country.
Most of the sworn statements were written years ago, but the employees attorneys were only granted permission to release them publicly in this week. The lawyers said that, one of the original women who brought the case, died in the year2014 as the proceedings crawled on without resolution.
The statements allege that the top male managers, some at the company's headquarters near the Akron, Ohio, dispatched scouting parties to stores to find the female employees they wanted to sleep with, and laughed about women's bodies in the workplace, and also pushed female subordinates into sex by pledging better jobs, higher pay or the protection from punishment.
Though the women made up a large part of Sterling's sales force, many said that they felt they had little recourse with their mostly male management. Sanya Douglas, a Kay sales associate and manager in the New York between 2003 and 2008, said that a manager even had a saying for male leaders coaxing women into sexual favors to advance their careers, calling it "going to the big stage."
Sterling spokesman David Bouffard told to The Post in a statement on Monday that the company officials have thoroughly investigated the allegations and have concluded they are not substantiated by the facts and also certainly do not reflect our culture.
Allegations of the sexual harassment and discrimination "involve a very small number of individuals," he said, adding that their claims were included in the arbitration filings by employees' attorneys "to paint a negative and distorted picture of the company."
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According to the 2015 filings, in the arbitration Sterling presented experts, which said it had reviewed some employee allegations and concluded that the company "devotes adequate resources to manage complaints of unwanted sex-related behavior,".
Not all of the 69,000 class members are alleging the sexual impropriety. Many are also accusing Sterling of wage violations, arguing women were systematically paid less than men and also passed over for promotions given to the less experienced male colleagues.
The former and current employees are seeking the punitive damages and years of back pay, though no estimate of the potential damages has been given. A class hearing, during which the witnesses will be called to testify before the arbitration judge for the first time, is scheduled for the early next year.
Sterling, as like the other U.S. companies, requires all the workers to waive their right to bring any employment-related disputes against their employer in the public courts. Instead, complaints must be decided in the arbitration - a private, quasi-legal system where the cases are guaranteed little transparency.
Since the year 2015, The Post has requested to review the employee statements submitted as part of the arbitration, all of which were designated as confidential. The employees attorneys have also sought to make them publicly available. Attorneys for the employees and the company recently reached an agreement that the documents could be made public on the condition that they do not identify any of the individuals to whom conduct was attributed.
More than 1,300 pages of the sworn statements were released on Sunday and feature company-approved redactions which obscure the names of managers and executives accused of harassment or abuse. But a memorandum by the employees attorneys supporting their motion for the class certification, filed in the year 2013, revealed that the top executives including Mark Light, now chief executive of the Sterling's parent company, Signet Jewelers, were among those accused of having sex with the female employees and promoting women based upon how they responded to the sexual demands.
Light did not respond to the requests for comment, and the company did not make him available for the interview. The company declined to address the detailed questions about allegations made by the former employees against Light and other managers.
Mrudula Duddempudi.
