The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on Tuesday sued a Lincoln County farm in U.S. District Court, alleging that its owners allowed male supervisors to sexually harass seasonal female workers.
The federal agency charged with enforcing employment laws that protect workers from discrimination sued the County Fair Farm in Jefferson but did not name its owners or male supervisors in the eight-page complaint. The farm is owned by Susan and Andrew Williamson, according to the town office.
Court documents did not include the name of their attorney.
Andrew Williamson said late Wednesday afternoon that the charges outlined by the EEOC “have no validity.”
The farm owner said that EEOC investigators visited the farm in June.
“We don’t operate that kind of operation here at all,” he said. “The complaint [to the EEOC] was filed by two or three people out of the hundreds who have worked here. That isn’t how things are here. What they do on their own private time is their business.”
County Fair Farm allegedly violated federal law by creating and maintaining a sexually hostile work environment for female farmworkers beginning in 2003, according to the complaint. The lawsuit was filed after conciliation efforts between the agency and the farm owners failed to reach an agreement acceptable to the EEOC.
Aurora Del Rosario Clemente Arpaiz filed a complaint with the commission that said she worked for the farm during the growing season from 2007 to 2010 and again in 2012, according to the document filed in federal court in Portland. She and other female workers allegedly were propositioned repeatedly for sex and subjected to lewd comments about their bodies by their supervisors and male co-workers while working at the farm.
During the 2012 growing season, Arpaiz lived in a trailer on the farm, the complaint said. At night her supervisor often would stand or sit outside the door and stare. She would lock herself inside, refusing to let him in and afraid to leave the trailer.
After she complained to the farm owners during the 2012 growing season, the harassment by her male co-workers and her supervisor increased, the complaint said. She was fired in November 2012 when she told the owners that “she could not take the harassment any longer.”
The EEOC is seeking unspecified damages on behalf of the women who were subjected to sexual harassment and an injunction ordering the farm to protect workers from such harassment in the future.
“County Fair Farm has a responsibility to protect its workers, not tolerate harassment of them,” Sara Smolik, trial attorney in the EEOC’s Boston office, said Wednesday in a press release.
