This Day in Labor History: December 5, 1997

On December 5, 1997, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the plaintiffs in the appeal of a paltry ruling in Jenson v. Eveleth Taconite Co, and ordered a jury trial. This was the first sexual harassment class action lawsuits in American history and was about women in the steel industry suffering endemic sexual harassment.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 meant that discrimination of the basis of gender was now illegal. It took several years for the real upshot of this to become clear to most Americas. Even the Johnson administration didn’t take it seriously when it was part of the law and blew it off for awhile. But with the rise of the feminist movement in the early 1970s, it was clear women were going to push for true equality. One key site of that equality was the job. Women who wanted into the male dirty work professions rarely identified as feminists. They didn’t have much in common with political feminists and they mostly wanted to work to make money for their families, the same as anyone else. But regardless of their political motivations, they applied for these jobs and the companies eventually had to accept them.

Now, some companies responded to this work by demanding that women be sterilized if they were going to work these dirty jobs. This was because the companies feared lawsuits based on birth defects caused by all the toxicity the workers were exposed to. The companies had no interest in actually making sure that workers did not get sick or that they not pollute, they just didn’t want the lawsuits. The courts ended up mostly shrugging their shoulders at this. Notably, the unions, entirely controlled by men and facing rank and file hostility to women entering the workforce, were indifferent. It wasn’t a great look.

Not every workplace was toxic to the point that the companies could deny the job to women unless they got sterilized. Many of these jobs were just your regular kind of dirty work. So it was harder to keep them out. Lois Jenson got a job at Eveleth Taconite in 1975. This was a company in Minnesota, mining on the Iron Range. The workers were represented by the United Steel Workers. She was not the only woman to get a job there. But they faced massive, overwhelming hostility from everyone, bosses and workers. Nothing can unite employer and employee like male supremacy. This took the form of overwhelming sexual harassment. Name calling, well that was just the beginning. Masturbation was a favorite of these men. Sometimes, a man would pull out his cock in front of a worker and start jerking off. Other times, men would masturbate into the women’s lockers. Once, a woman using a porta potty had it kicked over while she was inside. One worker had a man come up from behind her and grab her breasts.

The company didn’t care. Worse, the union didn’t care. The USW was awful here. Lois Jenson was the bravest of these workers. In 1984, she sent a letter to the Minnesota Department of Human Rights, outlining the horrors she and other women had experienced. She still worked there. Men responded by slashing her tires in the parking lot. The USW worked with the company to divide women to try and get some of them to testify against the other women. The state tried to get the company that owned the mine, which was now some Ohio-based company, to pay off Jenson to end the case, but the company refused to even do that.

So the case went into the courts in 1988. Some of her Jenson’s coworkers, Patricia Kosmach and Kathy Anderson joined the case. It became class action. None of this helped Jenson’s life at the mine. She actually stuck this out all the way until 1992, which is amazing. But the job paid. She finally quit and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. It didn’t take long for the legal system to start cracking down on the company. In 1992, a judge ruled that the company had created a toxic environment and ordered mandatory sexual harassment training for all employees. The liability trial began shortly after.

But the special master, a District Court judge named Patrick McNulty, was basically on the side of the company and called the women “histrionic.” He gave them a measly $10,000 each. There were other problems. The judge had a tiny problem with shoplifting, which is why he was moved from active work to special master work in the first place. Evidently, he was addicted to pocketing packs of cigarettes. He was also in his 70s, about to die, and was an active Catholic. In other words, this judge was not exactly inclined to be sympathetic to the complaints of women in mines about sexual harassment.

The women immediately appealed. The Eighth Circuit agreed with the women. A jury trial was ordered on December 5, 1997. Just before the trial was to commence, the company finally settled for $3.5 million. Shortly after, the Supreme Court ruled in Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services that the Civil Rights Act applied to sexual harassment, which gave these rulings more force. It was unanimous, but of course Antonin Scalia really wanted to limit its implications.

In 2005, this case was made into the film North Country, starring Charlize Theron. It’s not very good. Jenson refused to sell her story to the filmmakers, so they made up the whole thing, condensed the story and while they didn’t have to exaggerate anything, they did to make it more moviestastic.

1997 was a moment when sexual harassment was finally beginning to be taken seriously. Scumbags such as Clarence Thomas and Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy had repeatedly shown that this was a problem that went all the way to the top of the political system and was endemic in every part of American life. This is one area in which real progress has been made. It’s not perfect for sure, but it’s also a lot less egregious than it used to be. Not many bosses these days are going to put up with comments on a woman’s breasts in front of other coworkers and there’s no reason that women shouldn’t expect action on such a front. Of course in the Trump administration, moving back to the good old days before the feminazis got in the way of talking about tits on the job is at the top of the political agenda.

This is the 583rd post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.