SALT LAKE CITY — A janitorial company has agreed to pay $400,000 to its Utah employees who a federal regulator found had suffered sexual harassment.
HHS Environmental, LLC, will also update its harassment policies and training and it will send letters of apology to the female employees, according to a settlement agreement with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
“Employers have an obligation to protect their employees from sexual harassment occurring on their watch,” said Mary O’Neill, regional attorney for the EEOC’s Phoenix District Office, in a news release.
HHS is a Texas-based company providing janitorial services to hospitals, according to court documents in the case. Those documents say the case at the heart of the settlement occurred in 2016 and 2017 at what was then called Salt Lake Regional Medical Center.
It has since been renamed Holy Cross Hospital. The hospital was not named as a party in the case. Court records say hospital administrators who learned of harassment complaints forwarded them to HHS.
Those complaints included a male HHS worker commenting on a co-worker’s breasts and touching her without permission, according to court records. The EEOC later found other HHS employees who were harassed.
“The company took no action for over a year to curb the harassment,” EEOC said in a news release, “and it retaliated against the female employees by firing two of them after they reported the sexual harassment. HHS also retaliated against another female victim by doubling her workload until she eventually resigned due to the untenable working conditions.”