Florida strip club pays $20,000 to settle sex discrimination suit involving bartender
Apparently, even a strip club can wind up settling a lawsuit if it doesn’t give everybody a fair shot at the jobs that don’t require employees getting naked.
Gold Inc., owner of Sammy’s Gentleman’s Club of Fort Walton Beach, will pay $20,000 and “significant equitable relief” to settle a sex discrimination lawsuit by the EEOC on behalf of James Sharp. Of that amount, $3,500 is for back pay damages, the rest for compensatory and punitive damages.
Sharp answered an online job ad for bartenders and servers by dropping by Sammy’s on Oct. 5, 2015, the lawsuit claimed. He had experience as a manager and bartender. But he also had a Y chromosome, which Sammy’s found disqualifying.
“Sharp spoke with [Sammy’s] manager, who informed Sharp that [Sammy’s] did not hire male bartenders,” the complaint said.
Sammy’s hired two women for the job, bringing its 2015 bartender count to 17 women and zero men. The EEOC argued that this runs afoul of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
“Federal law prohibits employment discrimination based on sex,” said Bradley Anderson, district director of the EEOC’s Birmingham District Office said in a statement. “An employer that makes hiring decisions based on a person’s gender violates the law, except in very limited circumstances. Barring an entire gender — half the population — from a bartending job is certainly not one of those exceptions.”
