A Kay Jewelers store in a Miami, Fla., mall. Jeff Greenberg (Universal Images Group via Getty)
Discrimination based on gender is expensive in the United States, the country of lawsuits and million-dollar fines and where the prosecution of any aspect of daily life (a slip on the street, a burn from too hot coffee) is law.
Sterling Jewelers, the diamond firm that owns the jewelry stores Jared and Kay Jewelers, has agreed to pay $175 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over prolonged wage and professional discrimination suffered by thousands of female employees, the newspaper reported Thursday.
The Washington Post
.
The amount is not excessive in a country where millionaire out-of-court settlements are common currency, but the context surrounding the case and, above all, the forging of the resolution is.
The cause, which was presented in 2008, became an emblem of the #MeToo movement a decade later, in 2017, when some of the women marginalized by Sterling revealed to the capital newspaper that they had been pushed to satisfy the sexual requirements of their bosses to get a promotion or even to keep your job.
The victims of discrimination were about 68,000, mostly commercial, between 2004 and 2018. One of the fifteen plaintiffs identified by name and surname has died while awaiting the resolution of the case.
The women's lawyers argued that the company paid them less than their male colleagues of equal rank, and also that they were promoted at a rate significantly below their merits.
Sterling, which runs some of the nation's largest jewelry retailers, popular for their
aspirational
claim , has spent millions on television commercials, so the pay of 175 million is hardly a setback in their accounts.
Especially when the lawsuit only focuses on salary and professional discrimination, not on the alleged cases of sexual harassment that many of the victims report.
However, as part of the case, the women filed affidavits alleging that they were regularly groped, harassed and pressured into granting sexual favors to their bosses, often at corporate conventions dominated by alcohol and a equivocal camaraderie.
"If you didn't do what he wanted, you didn't get access to your [favorite] store or get a raise," said a former commercial agent in a 2012 statement, as recalled in today's edition of the newspaper.
Gina Drosos, executive director of the parent company since the revelation of the harassment cases in 2017, declared this Thursday in a statement, collected by the Washington newspaper, that the company has worked for the last four years in the transformation of the “ business model and business culture" to create a "welcoming and inclusive environment where everyone is invited to show themselves as they are".
Of the amount of the agreement, which corroborates the forced update of old business cultures, toxic in many cases, 125 million will go to the plaintiffs, and the rest, to cover legal costs and attorneys' fees.
An agreement that closes a case almost 15 years old, during which corporate and male impunity -synonymous then- has been increasingly replaced by words such as diversity and equality.
In theory.
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