SOCIAL ISSUES

Working women reject obscenities, embraces, and double entendres

For more than a year, Joseph Consigli, a vice-president of Johns-Manville Corp. in Denver, pressured Mary K. Heelan, a former JM project coordinator, to have an affair with him. As his demands became more insistent and her refusals more adamant, he began sabotaging her work, claims Heelan. Finally, in April, 1974, Consigli threatened to dismiss her if she did not submit. Heelan refused and found herself out of a job.

Job-related sexual harassment is an old problem for women, but Heelan's response was new. She sued JM. In a landmark decision handed down in April, 1978, Denver District Court Judge Sherman G. Finesilver found JM guilty of sexual discrimination under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. "An employer is liable under Title VII when refusal of a supervisor's unsolicited sexual advances is the basis of the employee's termination," Finesilver wrote in his decision. JM made an outof-court settlement with Heelan for a reported $100,000. Consigli remains on the payroll.

Only a handful of similar lawsuits have been filed so far, but they have serious implications for business, because more are coming. Feminist groups have targeted the issue as a major new area for litigation. "We've talked openly about battered wives and battered children. The next thing is battered office workers," says Representative Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.). "More and more women are becoming aware that they don't have to accept it."

Organizing resistance. In many cases, they are being made aware by women's groups such as New York City's Working Women's Institute. The institute's Metropolitan Information & Referral Project sponsors TV spots urging victims of sexual harassment to phone the project for counseling. A counselor suggests "coping strategies"-for instance, suppressing embarrassment and speaking out clearly to the culprit-or, if the situation has reached the quit or dismissal stage, the names of lawyers equipped to handle such cases. The project has counseled several thousand women to date.

The few surveys that have been made of what was until recently a hush-hush topic indicate no shortage of potential

120 BUSINESS WEEK: October 1, 1979

plaintiffs. Surveying 155 women aged 19 to 61 in two upstate New York cities, the Working Women's Institute found that 70% had been sexually harassed at some point in their careers. Some 75% of the victims reported that the advances continued even when they ignored them. Half of the 18% who complained to their employers found that nothing was done about the problem, and a third found that the complaints led to such retaliation as unpleasant job assignments.

The situation in the public sector appears to be much the same as in the private. Responding to a questionnaire

in an employee magazine, Impact Journal, this summer, 63 women at the Housing & Urban Development Dept. in Washington reported that they had been sexually coerced by their HUD bosses or fellow workers. "You may be shocked to learn that 3 women out of 10 give in," wrote Impact editor Al Louis Ripskis. "Eighty percent say that making love with the boss paid off" in advancement or other job advantages, Ripskis reported, and most of those who turned down the invitation reported such aftereffects as skipped promotions.

Most women's groups believe that

sexual harassment is increasing as more women move into the work force, competing with men. "Sexual harassment is a way to assert power," says Freada R. Klein, founder of the Boston Alliance Against Sexual Coercion. The Alliance responds to 10 new complaints a week, double the number of complaints a year ago.

Policies lacking. Few companies have official policies on sexual harassment, and most feel uncomfortable dealing with the issue. "It can be very sensitive for an employer to intrude into relationships between male and female em

ployees," says Richard Bar

ron, assistant vice-president for personnel at Michigan Bell Telephone Co. in Detroit. Others take the attitude of Herman M. Mapelli, president of Western-Davis Ltd., a Denver liquor distributor, who says, "We don't have a policy because we don't have sexual harassment." Western-Davis recently blocked a claim for unemployment compensation by a woman truck driver who said she quit because of sexual harassment by a supervisor.

There is a growing feeling among companies, however, that they would be wise to have policies to protect their employees from harassment and themselves from lawsuits. The Working Women's Institute notes widespread corporate interest in the in-house workshops on sexual harassment it is designing for managers and employees. The institute reports numerous inquiries, although the program will not be ready till spring. Other companies have asked for help from the District of Columbia's Commission on Women, which is putting together an informational program on sexual harassment for employers and employees.

"We're trying to take the titillation out of the subject," says Susan Meyer. executive director of the Working Women's Institute. "We want employers to view sexual harassment with the same seriousness as they do any other intolerable working condition. We want them to handle it the way they do any other misconduct."

Provocative costumes. The use of corporate procedures, however, does not necessarily solve the problem for either

SOCIAL ISSUES

employee or employer. Maxine Munford, a former collections supervisor at James T. Barnes & Co., a Detroit mortgage company, is currently appealing a decision that found the company not guilty in a sexual-harassment case, on the ground that the employer's investigation of her dismissal was inadequate. Munford claims that the company checked her allegations with only three persons: two employees unrelated to the situation and the supervisor she had charged with harassment. The company contends that it conducted a proper investigation.

Women's groups agree that sexual harassment need not go as far as a demand for sex in exchange for job security in order to be objectionable. Obscenities directed specifically at women workers, uninvited embraces, or a steady diet of double entendres also qualify as harassment, they say. At Detroit's Metropolitan Airport, 30 waitresses charged sexual harassment when their employer, Host International Inc., required them to wear provocative costumes. The costumes made the wai

One sexually harassed woman collected $100,000. Her boss kept his job

tresses feel "available, cheap, sexual objects," says Jan Leventer of the Women's Justice Center, the women's lawyer. Local 24 of the Hotel & Restaurant Workers Union, the waitresses' bargaining agent, persuaded Host International to switch to more modest costumes, but the women declined to discontinue their lawsuit. They want to establish the legal principle that an employer cannot prescribe a revealing costume for women if it does not do so for men, a spokeswoman says.

Vulnerability. Although men can be victims of sexual harassment-by either women or homosexuals-the overwhelming majority of victims are women, usually those in low-paying jobs. A report on the problem by the Atlanta Community Relations Commission and the U. S. Labor Dept. concluded that the most vulnerable women were those who had few job skills, who have been divorced recently, and who have children to support. But sexual harassment can occur in executive suites as well as on assembly lines, and suits have been filed against businesses, government agencies, and universities.

In the wake of the Heelan decision, most such suits are filed under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which allows the victim to collect back pay and benefits. A separate state suit may enable her to collect damages. Since the plaintiff must prove that she was harassed because she is a woman, a Title VII case can produce such bizarre courtroom tactics as the questioning of Heelan's male co-workers

regarding whether her boss had ever made passes at them.

In addition to the Title VII precedent, California and Wisconsin have enacted laws giving unemployment insurance to employees who leave their jobs because of sexual harassment. Other states without specific laws have ruled that sexual harassment is an unacceptable working condition and therefore grounds for receiving unemployment compensation if the victim quits.

Despite the growing legal underpin

ning, sexual harassment cases are hard to win. The victim must prove that she was sexually coerced, that she resisted, that her refusal had a negative impact on her job, and that members of the opposite sex were not coerced. This frequently requires asking personnel officers and coworkers still employed by the company to testify in her favor. "Their sympathies may lie with the woman, but their paychecks lie with the company," says Klein at the Boston Alliance. A case often ends up as a matter of "her word against his," she

says.

Moreover, the law requires that the women complain about objectionable behavior through company channels before suing. Typically, a harassment victim tends to avoid doing this for fear that she will be transferred, fired, or otherwise punished by a company that she believes basically sides with the man. American Fidelity Assurance Co. in Oklahoma City won a sexual harassment case after it proved that the commercial artist who had charged her

Andrew Sacks

supervisor with sexual coercion after she quit had never reported the behavior to the company while she was employed. The judge ruled that the supervisor's behavior was "reprehensible" but that the woman had not given the company a chance to end it, says Brice E. Tarzwell, one of the lawyers representing the company.

Company channels. In the case of Michele Wells, the Western-Davis truck driver who claims she was subjected to physical and verbal abuse from her supervisor, the plaintiff complained only to a foreman while she was employed. "He told me I shouldn't take it personally, that it was more or less a big joke," she says. Wells says she quit after the supervisor threw her down on a lunchroom table and climbed on top of her, a charge denied by the company. Her claim for unemployment compensation was denied in part because she had failed to complain through channels.

Wells and other women involved in sexual harassment cases say they suffer psychological effects somewhat similar to those experienced by rape victims and, like rape victims, they may require psychiatric treatment. Most feel they cannot confide in husbands or boyfriends. Many have emotional difficulties in applying for other jobs. Some find themselves shunning makeup or switching to sexless clothes to make themselves less attractive.

"I began wondering if I was the trouble-maker, if something was wrong with me," says Sylvia E. Borgman, a former planning assistant with the Massachusetts State Employment & Training Council, whose supervisor embraced her during her first day on the job and continued to harass her thereafter. Borgman was denied unemployment compensation after she quit five months later, but the denial was reversed on appeal when Borgman presented the facts and the council personnel director backed her up.

Borgman, who says she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown when she quit, blames the harassment for back problems and fainting spells, symptoms that are common among harassment victims, according to the Michigan Task Force on Sexual Harassment, a group sponsored by the Michigan Labor Dept. and the University of Michigan. Members of the task force say they were shocked by the number of ailments disclosed by sexual-harassment victims. In fact, says Hilda Patricia Curran, director of the Michigan Labor Dept. Office of Women & Work, the psychosomatic side-effects of sexual harassment are so common that companies that fail to protect women employees could find themselves sued not only for violation of civil rights but for workers' compensation as well.

SOCIAL ISSUES

MOTHER JONES

By Ron Chernow

Illustration by Christoph Blumrich

Chicago-based consulting firm called

drive that winds up a slope to the entrance, a reminder that the hospital was once tended by an order of sisters. The hospital's affiliation with the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston can be seen in its small chapel and in the crucifixes that hang over each bed. The nursing students wear blue uniforms with little lace caps, which gives the hospital a genteel, Victorian atmosphere. If Pope John Paul II had gotten sick on his Boston pilgrimage last year, His Holiness would have been rushed to the buffcolored buildings in Brighton.

But the mercy of St. Elizabeth's has never comforted the employees. In early 1978, the largely female staff-responsible for scrubbing corpses, ladling out meals and rinsing bedpans-sill started out at the rock-bottom wage of $3.50 an hour. At the same time the hospital was baptizing a new $14 million pavillion, its directors were implementing a "stretch-out." Housekeepers, for example, were supposed to tidy up three floors instead of one. Pensions at the hospital. too, were medieval: Eleanor Albrecht, after a 20-year stint as a night nurse, banked a monthly

meetings were spirited quietly about the hospital wards inside pill capsules.

After the union campaign, shaken workers would talk about supervisors turned into "shock troops," of a "McCarthyite" atmosphere in the Catholic hospital, of an election climate "poisoned in a cold and calculating fashion." Four supporters of Local 880 of the Service Employees International Union were ultimately fired or suspended during the campaign.

On October 4, 1978, Local 880 lost the election by about 55 percent to 45 percent. Later, the regional National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) charged 22 hospital supervisors and administrators with 38 instances of unfair labor practices. The NLRB overturned the election. But fear cannot just be plucked out like a sharp splinter. In a follow-up election last June, Local 880 was again defeated.

New Propagandists Why did Local 880 get trounced in an election that should have been a piece of cake?

The culprit is a shadowy, powerful

MAY 1980

the Scotch tape firm) participates in more than a hundred union elections yearly and thwarts union interests in an extraordinary 98 percent of them. Ensconced in a secret command post in St. Elizabeth's, 3-M consultants composed letters to the employees, coached the supervisors and called all shots for management. Unsuspecting St. Elizabeth's workers were actually being subjected to an elaborate propaganda play. scripted by consultants who knew exactly how to defeat the union based on previous testing and experience.

Consultants from 3-M earn up to $800 per diem. They have a fetish about anonymity and often install their own telephone lines to escape switchboard detection. Union organizers are frequently unaware that 3-M professionals are on the premises. In fact, 3-M helped St. Elizabeth's beat a previous organizing drive by another union and received $75,000 for the work.

Three-M is the Cadillac of a new breed of management consulting firm that can smash unions with the icy logic of the old Winchester-rifle-toting Pinkerton detectives. Its people, and those

BREAKING THE BUSTERS

OSTON UNIVERSITY is no model employer. Despite a reputation for lavish spend

Bing, this behemoth of a private school rarely shares much money with its workers.

During the early 70s, the starting take-home pay for a Boston University secretary was a miserable $85 a week, with few fringes. The clerical workers tried and tried to organize, to no avail. What finally got them mad enough to try again was the university's institution of a merit salary plan-replacing regular, yearly step-raises with increases based solely on a supervisor's arbitrary evaluation. Represented by District 65 of the Distributive Workers of America (since amalgamated with the United Auto Workers), the clericals filed for a union election in May 1977.

Their big break came, oddly enough, when B.U. hired the union-busting Modern Management Methods (3-M). Of course, nobody saw it that way at the time. Three-M had acquired quite a name for itself around Boston, having defeated union organizing drives at several local hospitals. District 65 organizers showed their genius by analyzing these previous drives in order to develop a strategy. And that strategy hinged almost entirely on predicting 3-M's moves.

"Any of the campaigns we've heard about in which 3-M has beaten a union, the union has responded in the same way." explains former B.U. secretary-turnedDistrict-65-organizer Barbara Rahke. "We were different only because we let people know what was going to happen in advance."

A primary goal of Rahke and other union organizers was to characterize 3-M as the bad guys, the outsiders who didn't belong. To that end, they held workshops describing 3-M's typical successes-born of scare tactics, the literature war and the manipulation of supervisors. To the largely female audiences, the organizers also stressed the sexism of the firm's fronting only handsome, well-dressed young men. The weekly union bulletin Coffee Break ran regular articles, which made 3-M such an issue that the campus press, and eventually the Boston media, picked up the story. By the time the union busters got around to accusing the New York-based District 65 of sending in outside agitators, the clericals only laughed.

To undermine 3-M's expected attempt to discredit the union as rigid and undemocratic, the organizers distributed annotated copies of the union constitution to all prospective members. The handout explained that the clauses on compulsory attendance at union meetings, closed shops and picket lines were all simply ways of maintaining union solidarity. The pledge of loyalty to the union was just a sentimental vestige of the 1930s. Dues were what you paid to any club. As expected, 3-M raise: these issues right on schedule, but by then it didn't matter.

Organizers also made a conscious counter-appeal to supervisors, sending out letters urging them to resist administration pressure and encouraging them to call the union if they needed advice.

Probably one of the most effective tactics of all was publishing the university's union-busting budget in Coffee Break. Next to 3-M's reported $16,000 monthly fee, the average secretary's salary looked like pin money.

Organizer Rahke admits that workers at B.U. had a unique foe in university President John Silber, whose autocratic behavior helped stir up resentment. Still, the union decided early in the campaign not to let Silber become an issue. "To think that getting rid of Silber would solve the problems of the clericals," points out Rahke, "would have been a wrong assumption."

It took more than two years and two strikes, but it was worth it in the end. Three-M finally left in defeat. With their new contract last fall, the clericals got a grievance procedure, higher pay, better benefits and the satisfaction—rather rare these days-of having fought the big guys and won.

-Connie Paige

vogue industry remains a mystery, its success is incontrovertible. Unions won

73 percent of all representation elections in 1950, 57 percent in 1970; now they win only 46 percent of the time. Structural changes in the economy and an arteriosclerotic labor leadership are often cited as the chief factors behind organized labor's tailspin, and business is still flocking to the "Right to Work" states of the Sun Belt. But it is the New Pinkertons who have taught management how to capitalize on these handicaps for labor.

Enter John Stevens

To find out why the New Pinkertons can make patsies of even the best union organizers I decide to attend one of their traveling road shows. Three-M deals largely with an elite clientes — Allstate, Prudential, Travelers and Aetna in insurance alone. In contrast, a middle-brow firm called Executive Enterprises Inc. offers bread-and-butter advice for the corporate masses. In order to eavesdrop on a seminar, I don the pseudonym John M. Stevens-in homage to that great union-buster, J. P. Stevens-and pose as personnel manager for my father's defunct discount store in New York's Chinatown.

Executive Enterprises makes some minimal effort to screen out troublemakers. When I go to their New York office to pay the exorbitant $500 fee for the two-day session, I notice a memo above the registrar's desk: "Please do not accept registration from the following people." I get a glimpse of five names; at the bottom is written, "These people are BAD News!!"

The star of the seminar's first day at the Sheraton Centre is a bearded, middle-aged hipster named Charles Hughes. He wears a stylish beige suit, open-collared shirt and cream-colored loafers. With his &viator glasses to cap his wardrobe, he is the epitome of Sun Belt cool. A former personnel manager for nonunion IBM and Texas Instruments, Hughes travels some 365,000 miles a year touting the "union-free" gospel. He is the Billy Graham of the faith.

Hughes opens the session by telling us that a unionized hotel employee has angrily scratched out the seminar title"How to Maintain Non-Union Status"-from a lobby signboard. Flashing a little smirk, Hughes says that his lectures have been picketed and disrupted

MAY 1980