After reading the attached Color Time Painting case study, what do you think... Is Rachel being harassed?

After reading the attached Color Time Painting case study, what do you think…

Is Rachel being harassed?

Does the owner of Color Time Painting have any liability if Rachel files a legal complaint against Eric?

What advice would you give Eric?

Color Time Painting Color Time Painting recently hired Rachel for their west-side painting crew. Eric, crew supervisor for Color Time, had never hired a woman painter before; but Rachel had lots of experience and came highly recommended from another paint contractor. Eric decided to give her a try. After all, gender discrimination is illegal, isn’t it? Unfortunately, it has only been a few weeks and some of the men are already complaining about her. They say she doesn’t pull her weight. She won’t go up the ladders to paint the high spots; she won’t help unload the paint; and she doesn’t clean up at the end of the day. "Besides," one of them said, "I got no problem working with women, but she’s a lousy painter!" Rachel has complained to Eric that the men refuse to work with her. "How am I supposed to know which job we’re working on," she said, "when they won’t give me the day’s schedule? Everyone else gets it the day before and I don’t get it at all. When we get to the job, my paint is always loaded at the back of the truck under all the five-gallon buckets so I struggle to get it unloaded while they all stand around and snicker, making cracks about a woman in a man’s job. Worse yet, yesterday when I went to get my lunch cooler from the back, someone had written GO HOME on the side of it with a black permanent marker! You’ve got to do something, Eric, I’m tired of the harassment and their abuse." Eric groaned silently to himself. "I should have known better than to hire a woman," he thought. "What a mess. Now I have to let Rachel go, and I’m never going to hire another woman. The paint industry is just no place for women."