Hong Kong restaurant staff suspended after ex-employee accuses former colleagues of sexual harassment
Hong Kong Free Press
A restaurant in Hong Kong announced it had suspended some members of staff after a former employee said she had been sexually harassed by a manager and colleagues while working there.
Terrace in Seaside, a Korean restaurant run by catering chain Fulum Group, said in a Facebook post on Sunday that it was aware of allegations about a member of staff being sexually harassed by colleagues at work and in online work groups. Following an internal investigation, staff involved had been “suspended and disciplined,” it said.
The statement was made after a woman said on social media platform Threads on Sunday that she had been called “big boob girl” by a female manager at the Festival Walk branch of Terrace in Seaside on her first day as a part-time employee.
According to the post, on her second day, the manager called the woman “big boob lin,” using a Cantonese sexualised slang term that refers to women.
Other senior colleagues later started calling the woman “big boob lin,” too, and made jokes about her physical appearance, the post read. On a rota shared in a colleagues’ WhatsApp group, the manager used “big boob lin” to represent the woman.
The Threads post, which includes screenshots from the Whatsapp Group, has attracted more than 15,500 likes and over 7,600 reposts as of Wednesday.
Talking to Yahoo News on Monday, the woman, whose surname is Lin, said she had suffered from insomnia as a result of the workplace sexual harassment. She said she tried not to respond when her ex-colleagues called her “big bood lin, ” but they had not stopped calling until she responded.
On Monday, Lin said on Threads that she had resigned from the restaurant and had reported her experience to Hong Kong’s equality watchdog the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC).
She urged the restaurant to reveal how the staff involved in the alleged harassment had been punished, adding that they should apologise to her in person.
EOC expressed ‘deep concern’
The EOC issued a statement on Monday expressing its “deep concern” over an incident relating to the suspected sexual harassment of a restaurant employee.
“Generally, the EOC does not publicly comment on whether individual cases constitute illegal discriminatory behaviour. However, according to the Sex Discrimination Ordinance, sexual harassment by an employee towards a colleague during the course of employment is illegal,” it said in the Chinese-language statement.
“Sexual harassment includes unwelcome sexual conduct in physical, visual, verbal, or non-verbal forms, where a reasonable person would expect that the person being harassed would feel offended, humiliated, or intimidated by such behaviour,” the equality watchdog said.
It added that an employer may bear liability for sexual harassment committed by an employee, even if the employer was unaware of it, unless the employer could prove that reasonable and practical measures were taken to prevent the harassment from occurring.
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