Help

BI’s Article search uses Boolean search capabilities. If you are not familiar with these principles, here are some quick tips.

To search specifically for more than one word, put the search term in quotation marks. For example, “workers compensation”. This will limit your search to that combination of words.

To search for a combination of terms, use quotations and the & symbol. For example, “hurricane” & “loss”.

Login Register Subscribe

Burger King franchisee Carrols settles EEOC harassment suit for $2.5M

Reprints

Carrols Corp., the world's largest Burger King Corp. franchisee, has agreed to pay $2.5 million to settle a sexual harassment and retaliation lawsuit first brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1998.

The president of the Syracuse, N.Y.-based company, which operates more than 572 Burger King restaurants, said in a statement that it only agreed to the settlement because it was less costly than continuing to pursue litigation.

The EEOC on Tuesday said the lawsuit had alleged discrimination against 89 female employees at Burger King locations throughout the Midwest, Southeast and Northeast. The agency said the alleged harassment — which ranged from obscene comments, jokes and propositions to unwanted touching, exposure of genitalia, strip searches, stalking and rape — was perpetrated by managers in most cases.

The EEOC said the company retaliated against some of the women by cutting their hours, manufacturing discipline against them and firing them, while it forced more women to quit because the harassment made their working conditions intolerable.

To settle the litigation, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Syracuse, Carrols will pay $2.5 million in compensatory damages and lost wages to the 89 women and implement measures that include increasing employees' awareness of Carrols' anti-harassment policies, the EEOC said.

“As this case demonstrates, the EEOC will persist in enforcing the legal prohibitions against harassment until the matter is resolved,” EEOC general counsel P. David Lopez said in a statement. “Although employers may have adequate anti-harassment policies on paper, they are of little value when employers fail to take positive steps to prevent or remedy harassment.

%%BREAK%%

“Employers must make sure employees know about the policies and then they must respond effectively when complaints are brought forward,” Mr. Lopez said.

Carrols said in a statement that the EEOC had unsuccessfully sought to establish a class action based on a claim of “pattern or practice” across its restaurants in 13 states, and that court rulings left “only a relative handful of claims to be resolved and a vindication of Carrols' longstanding written policies and procedures.”

“We unequivocally do not tolerate sexual harassment in our workplace and have resolved this litigation without any admission of wrongdoing after many years of intensive, costly and frustrating litigation with the EEOC,” Daniel T. Accordino, CEO of Carrols Restaurant Group Inc., a unit of Carrols Corp., said in the statement,

“At Carrols, we take sexual harassment very seriously and have long had comprehensive procedures and processes in place to encourage our employees to report violations to our policies and to do so without fear of retaliation. We also have a long history of thoroughly investigating employee complaints and terminating employees who have harassed others.”

Mr. Accordino added, “We agreed to this negotiated settlement at this stage of the litigation simply because the settlement payment we've agreed to make is far less than the cost and expense we would incur to continue to litigate each of the remaining individual claims to conclusion given the age of the claims and because hundreds of potential witnesses were now, after 14 years, in scattered locations across the country, ill or deceased.

“Our agreement with the EEOC to continue, and in limited circumstances, enhance our best practices on harassment prevention and training confirms our commitment to providing a workplace with equal opportunity and free from sexual harassment.”

Read Next