Eight former employees of a Reno, Nevada warehouse say managers let sexually explicit, violent music blast through commercial speakers for nearly two years, despite complaints that came almost daily.
Hostile Work Environment · Sex DiscriminationTL;DR
- Eight former S&S Activewear employees, seven women and one man, allege managers let sexually explicit and violently misogynistic music play throughout the company’s 700,000-square-foot Reno warehouse for close to two years.
- According to the complaint, workers raised “almost daily” objections. Management allegedly defended the music as motivational and kept it playing until the threat of a lawsuit.
- A federal district judge dismissed the music-based harassment claim in 2021, reasoning that because the music offended men and women alike, it couldn’t be discrimination “because of sex.”
- On June 7, 2023, the Ninth Circuit reversed that reasoning, ruling that an employer can’t dodge Title VII liability just by pointing out that everyone found the conduct offensive.
What the appeals court settled is narrower than a verdict, and arguably more important: whether a company can broadcast music degrading an entire class of workers and escape a discrimination claim simply because the offense was distributed equally.
The Facts
S&S Activewear is an apparel manufacturer that operates a 700,000-square-foot warehouse in Reno, Nevada. Eight former employees, identified in court papers as Stephanie Sharp, Cynthia Martinez, Patricia Speight, Laura Viramontes Garcia, Rebecca Garoutte, Anthony Baker, Sharene Wagoner, and Ruby Lopez Colocho, sued the company after leaving their jobs there. Seven are women. One, Baker, is a man.
Their complaint centers on what management allegedly allowed to play through the warehouse’s sound system, and what happened when workers objected to it.
What Workers Say Happened
According to the complaint, managers and employees at the warehouse routinely played what the plaintiffs describe as “sexually graphic, violently misogynistic” music, broadcast from commercial-strength speakers positioned throughout the facility. The songs, as characterized in the complaint and summarized by the court, used derogatory terms for women and, in at least one instance, described extreme violence against a pregnant woman, including being forced into a car trunk and driven into water.
The music wasn’t confined to a break room or a single station. Sometimes, according to the complaint, employees placed speakers on forklifts and drove them around the warehouse floor, which made the sound harder to predict or avoid. Workers say the music routinely overpowered ordinary operational noise and was, in practical terms, inescapable during a shift.
The complaint also describes the music as a backdrop to other conduct by male employees: sexually explicit pantomiming, yelled obscenities, sexual remarks directed at coworkers, and the sharing of pornographic videos. Women made up roughly half the warehouse workforce, and the plaintiffs say the content was especially demeaning toward them, though the lone male plaintiff, Baker, says he found it offensive as well.
What Management Allegedly Knew, and What It Did
The complaint says employees complained about the music “almost daily.” Rather than stopping it, management defended the practice as motivational, according to the allegations, and the music kept playing for close to two years, until the prospect of litigation changed the calculus.
Nothing in the record establishes why management held that position, or whether anyone above the warehouse floor formally reviewed the complaints. The opinion doesn’t describe a specific investigation, policy memo, or disciplinary response. What it describes is a pattern: repeated objections, met with a defense of the practice, met with continuation.
From the Opinion
“sexually graphic, violently misogynistic” Plaintiffs’ description of the warehouse music, as characterized in the complaint
“[i]nstead of avoiding Title VII exposure, this employer doubles it.” Quoting Bostock v. Clayton County, 140 S. Ct. 1731, 1741 (2020)
the claim was “fatally flawed” District court’s original characterization, later rejected by the Ninth Circuit
