Customer abuse and violence

Customer abuse and violence has no place in retail or fast food workplaces.

It doesn’t matter if it’s physical violence, swearing, yelling or spitting – customer abuse should never be tolerated by you or your employer.
The best thing you can do to help stamp it out in the future is report it. Reporting customer abuse means there is an official record of the incident and helps the SDA to push for better protections on your behalf.

It is your employers responsibility to provide you with a safe workplace. They should:

• Adopt a zero tolerance approach to customer abuse such as warning customers
• Train workers on how to understand and manage customer behaviour before it escalates
• Provide additional training for managers on how to intervene and support workers
• Provide security guards on-site to deal with abusive customers
• Clearly communicate policies to customers and provide clear signage demonstrating standards of customer behaviour

For many years, the SDA has been running a nationwide campaign to eliminate customer abuse and violence from your workplaces called No One Deserves A Serve.

So far, with the support of SDA members, we have:

• Called on retail and fast food employers to commit to a zero-tolerance approach
• Held two national roundtables bringing industry groups and employers together to work towards industry wide solutions on customer abuse
• Initiated an Australia first trial of preventative measures against customer abuse
• Worked with individual employers to introduce positive signage in stores, stronger policies and training
• Launched national advertisements calling out abusive customer behaviour
• Worked with State and Territory Governments to introduce legislation and harsher penalties
• Established the Retail Employee Safety Council