Misrepresented: women fight harassment and the union boys' club

Progressive, The, August, 1996 by Camille Colatosti

When the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission sued Mitsubishi in April in a historic class-action suit claiming that as many as 500 women workers had suffered sexual harassment, the company had egg on its face, but so did the union.

"It seems like the numbers are a lot higher than what we were aware of," confessed Donald Shelby, vice president of the United Auto Workers Local 2488. Shelby also said that he thought Mitsubishi had tried to improve the workplace for women in the last year.

But the seriousness of the allegations against Mitsubishi belie that claim. The EEOC charged that harassment at the Mitsubishi plant in Normal, Illinois, was "standard operating procedure." According to the EEOC, women workers complained of groping, crude graffiti, and derogatory epithets. Male supervisors and line workers rubbed their genitals against female workers, and masturbated while staring at the women working beside them, the EEOC said. The EEOC report also alleges that managers coerced some women into performing sex acts.

For many working women, especially those employed in blue-collar jobs traditionally held by men, the allegations come as no surprise. Sexual harassment is a fact of life for them. And while ultimately it is the employer's responsibility to provide a harassment-free workplace, it is also the obligation of the union to represent all workers fairly and to ensure that management enforces the contract.

The bargaining agreement between Mitsubishi and the United Auto Workers Local 2488 included an anti-discrimination clause opposing "any type of harassment or discrimination." But, says Cynthia Pierre, deputy director of the EEOC's regional office in Chicago, the union did not ensure that the company enforced this clause. "The union really did not help alleviate women's mistreatment," Pierre says.

Sexual-harassment problems persist for union women in part because the majority of union officials are male. While women compose a larger percentage of the unionized work force than ever before in the United States--37 percent--they make up only about 8 percent of elected and appointed union officials.

And in many blue-collar jobs, women are still dramatically underrepresented. Only 2.3 percent of construction workers are women, for example. Only 8.9 percent of precision production workers and 3.6 percent of mineworkers are female.

"At a work site, we're usually a minority of one," says Mary Baird, a founding member of Cleveland's Hard Hatted Women, a group of female construction workers. As one tradeswoman explains, "Being the only woman on a construction site [means] having no one to relate to, not having rest-room facilities, having to speak up for myself on issues that I feel are unfair practices at work, and not having any support."

To fight isolation, some women form workplace committees. The Women's Action Group is a committee in a building-trades local at a large electronics company in Massachusetts. The committee came together to support three women who had experienced sexual harassment from coworkers.

"In each case, the women were advancing to higher levels than the men approved of, in mostly male job areas," says Jean Alonso, a leader of the committee. "The attacks were attempts to intimidate the women and to force them to give up their positions. The attacks were gross in nature--smearing of faces, taunting about menstrual blood, and men exposing themselves. Men even formed a `women-hater's club.' "

Many women recognize that sexual harassment is designed to let them know that they are not wanted at the work site. The isolation that blue-collar women experience can become intense. Tradeswomen face hostility from both supervisors and co-workers.

Jane (who asks that her last name not be used) works in an isolated area at the American Axle plant in Detroit. She's a member of the United Auto Workers Local 235. She says she experiences harassment nearly every day of her working life. She works with her back to the aisle. Until recently, male co-workers constantly stared at her rear end. She put up with this situation for months before she complained to her supervisor and her union representative. Within hours, the company installed sheet metal behind Jane, blocking her co-workers' view. A week later, a drawing of a rear end appeared on the sheet metal. Then someone left dirty hand prints on the picture, positioned so they appeared to be grabbing at the buttocks.

Melanie Zimmer works as an airplane mechanic for Northwest Airlines in Minneapolis. When she started work in the mid-1980s, she says, "everywhere you looked there were sexually suggestive pictures of women on the tool boxes, on the walls, hand-drawn on lunchroom tables."

For years, blue-collar women have said such pin-ups create a hostile atmosphere. In 1991, the courts finally agreed. A federal judge in Jacksonville, Florida, issued an injunction against Jacksonville Shipyards, Inc., and declared that "the posting of calendars and posters with nude or scantily clad women is a form of sexual harassment forbidden by Title VII of the 1964 and 1991 Civil Rights Act." Nevertheless, pornography remains a part of the shop floor. Often both union representatives and management see the pictures as "no big deal."