Lawyer Sarah Duggan’s fight to educate service industry employees on discrimination
Photo by Emma Hilboldt
It’s rare to be sitting inside of recordBar on a summer evening and be surrounded by people dressed in business casual attire and exchanging business cards. While the venue is usually set up for a concert, what holds the space tonight is a group of people hoping to make a change in the service industry.
Attorney Sarah Duggan has organized her first of many events to bring awareness to the discrimination that happens to service industry individuals and to give tips on how to fight back. After working in the service industry for 15+ years and a short stent in law enforcement, Duggan went back to school to become a lawyer, motivated by her own life experiences.
“Almost every job I had where I stood up for myself or someone else, I was consistently retaliated against for it,” says Duggan. “My hours got cut, and I couldn’t work certain shifts with certain people. That’s why in the service industry, we typically don’t say anything when something bad happens to us.”
Many unique things about the service industry make it a ripe place for workplace abuse of all kinds. Duggan’s goal is to educate people on how to identify this abuse, how to document it, and where to go once they have a complaint.
In Missouri, we have at-will employment. Meaning that you can be fired for anything or nothing at all. “If your boss says ‘Hey, I don’t like that you’re a vegetarian’ and if you’re not a vegetarian for religious reasons then they can fire you for it and it’s not illegal.” The only exception to at-will employment in Missouri is discrimination. This is where Sarah Duggan comes in to help those who don’t know to understand what discrimination is under the eyes of the law.
From how to recognize discrimination to how to file a lawsuit, Sarah Duggan is single-handedly using her education and experience to help those who need it. “I hope you advocate for yourself and those you see being discriminated against. There are ways around this and we have to start holding employers accountable otherwise they will continue to harass us and discriminate against us,” Duggan spoke to the crowd.
Duggan will be holding more events like this in the future, covering various areas of your rights as a service industry worker.
