The Wash Rag Issue 4.2 May, 1996 MITSUBISHI PLOTS REVENGE A NEW APPROACH UNFOLDS Hundreds of women currently or formerly employed by Mitsubishi have filed suit against the auto maker for sexual harassment described as routine and plant-wide. The plant named in the suit is located in Normal, Illinois. According to a report aired on To The Contrary, the Japanese owners of Mitsubishi are not to be blamed, although it is hard for me to hold the owners blameless, as they have certainly had prior complaints. To the Contrary panelists themselves said that in order for things to change, management has to support a change in attitude and employers have to be educated. The harassment included name calling, fondling, sex as a requirement for employment, and sex parties where pictures were taken and passed around at work. Mitsubishi is fighting by encouraging employees to demonstrate against the EEOC and the women filing the suit. They even gave employees the day off so that they could do so. This does not sound like an employer who should be held blameless to me. An interesting aspect of this is the claim by many women that they have worked there for years and have never seen nor experienced sexual harassment. I have been claiming that this attitude by women lucky enough not to be exposed to sexual harassment is very destructive to those who are trying to take legal action. In the first place, certain classes of women will never be sexually harassed. These include women with connections, women too dumb to be a threat to their co-workers or managers, and women who are prostitutes and therefore don’t consider the treatment as damaging. Furthermore, it is bad logic. Not A does not always imply B. DEJÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN A report on Dateline, March 8, 1996 described the events leading up to the death of the first female ramp chief at Boston’s Logan Airport, Susan Terreskowitz. She worked for Northwest Airlines, and started as a baggage handler. The report stated the airlines has hired losers, thieves and possible murderers to handle baggage, and that some baggage handlers fear for their lives. Susan had objected to vulgarity, obscenity, and locker room behavior in the lunch room, and she later complained to her boss about this. Afterwards she became a lightening rod for abuse. In 1992 she left the airport to get lunch for the men. She never got to the restaurant. Employees didn’t report her missing until 30 hours later. Someone had punched her timecard out. Police were called to a body shop where her body was found stuffed in the trunk of her car, brutally beaten and stabbed, with blood dripping on the ground. At the time no clear motive was found. Later, her mother found a diary about the torment she had experienced at work. She had been the butt of graffiti, filth, and unrelenting hostility. The men’s room had to be repainted because so much graffiti had been written there about her. She received obscene phone calls at home. Her boyfriend’s tires were slashed. Her parents hired a lawyer to make sure the airlines and Union, the International Association of Machinists, admitted responsibility for having allowed this to go on even though they knew about it. The diary names manager after manager who were unable to stop the harassment. They told her that if they found out who was writing the graffiti they would be fired, but Bobby Brooks was caught but not fired. Joe Nuzzo was said to be one of the ringleaders in harassing Susan. He was terminated. He was violent against men as well but he was later re-hired. Fellow employees say that she continued to be harassed up to the end. Susan fought to be named chief, and some thought that she was resented because she was a woman in a supervisory capacity. Her last complaint was about graffiti of a coffin with her name on it. Julie Lewis, the director of personnel at Northwest Airlines, says that the airlines doesn’t tolerate sexual harassment. The Federal Government had been investigating a criminal enterprise going on among the baggage handlers at Northwest Airlines. It involved credit card fraud that involved employees stealing credit cards sent by mail. They were using them and fencing them. They used fake ID’s to get cash advances. In the summer of 1992 they closed in on the operation. At that point they went back and examined whether there was any association between her death and the credit card fraud. They don’t think that she was helping with the investigation. Several of the men she named in the diary were also accused of fraud. Joe Nuzzo denies that he had anything to do with her death. It is thought that whoever killed her may have thought that she was involved in the investigation. A Federal judge censored the airlines for not controlling the work place. The case that the parents initiated against the airlines was found in their favor. The parents reached an agreement with the airlines and the union in the hope of finding the murderer. Details of the settlement were not disclosed. The reward for finding the murderer of Susan was increased to $20,000.00. We can’t help remembering that Gwendi Nordseth died when her car exploded in Phoenix, Arizona while she was in the process of filing a sexual harassment complaint. And the fire in my own vehicle last month which was in my hydraulic system, and which several sources have told me was extremely rare, left me with a very eerie feeling. If I hadn’t been stuck in a snow bank at the time, with a ready source of moisture to throw on it, but moving so I could not see the smoke, my vehicle might very well have exploded as well. There is no doubt that this is a more common phenomenon than has been thought, and women who plan to object to sexual harassment or fight it in court, would do well to plan on protecting themselves from the retaliation which is so often associated with it. THE MILITARY TAKES IT ON THE CHIN FROM SEVERAL DIRECTIONS The most upsetting report of sexual harassment came from a woman in the US Navy, Angela Shanks, who is an electrician in the Navy. The report of the incident was on 20/20 on March 8, 1996 A group of Navy men and women were transferred from the ship the Samuel Gompers to Houston, Texas. They had a party in Norfolk before the flight. During the flight, CPO George Powell, who had a history of alcoholism, put his hands between her thighs, grabbed her breast, put his hands down her pants. At one point, she pushed him to the floor and at another changed seats to get away from him, but he followed. The harassment went on for five hours. According to other passengers and her own statements, she was very emphatic that he leave her alone. A Navy Chaplain seemed to take the CPO’s side and tried to restrain her. An Air Force officer finally ordered the Chaplain to restrain Powell, and suggested three charges be filed against him, public intoxication, sexual harassment and the refusal to obey orders. Shanks asked Chaplain Carter to help her file charges but he discouraged her. She repeatedly asked him for help. He made a report and showed it to her but his memory seemed to have been poor as practically none of the worst treatment she had endured from Powell was in the report. The Navy investigated but did not release any information to the public until a newspaper reported on the incident. Angela Shank’s mother helped her go to court. The Navy seems to be protecting the CPO. 20/20 learned that the Navy had agreed to the terms of his “show trial” a week before, 89 days incarceration and a reduction in rank. The Navy refused comment. Powell was never consulted about the terms of the trial. Commander Everett W. Greene, who took over the Navy’s Equal Opportunity Branch after Tailhook, has been accused of sexual harassment by Mary Elizabeth Felix. Apparently she confided personal problems to Cdr. Greene, and according to him, she came on to him, but he politely turned her down. He says that he later wrote a poem to her that was quite personal. He also sent her a thank you card after a business trip. He has been charged with fraternization and conduct unbecoming an officer. He was court-martialed. Both Felix and Lt. Castrucci, who also worked for Greene and joined her in the suit, said that they felt he got too personal. Both said that he did not use vulgar language. Lt. Castrucci’s charges were dropped. Greene was acquitted of all charges. He had been up for admiral but he was dropped from the list after the acquittal. Both women have left the Navy. Greene is still trying to get his promotion. Due to the language used in the poem and the thank you note, I am skeptical of his version of the story. A marine woman stationed in Georgia was followed home by a male marine. He broke into her house and raped her. The incident was covered up by Marine officials. He claimed that she wanted to have sex with him. He had previously been accused of sexual misconduct on two other bases by two other women. In both cases, he was transferred and never received any punishment. He also had beaten his wife. ERA MAYBE I’M MISSING SOMETHING This past Friday, I attended a workshop which had been advertised to train individuals to work for passage of an equal rights amendment to the US Constitution. I must say that I was disappointed that first of all, the time for the beginning of the workshop was changed from 9:30 am to 1:00 p.m. and I wasn’t informed of this. That left me with 3½ hours to kill since I’d left my vehicle for maintenance and gotten a ride to the workshop. I was then disappointed because the national representatives who were supposed to have held the workshop had decided that they weren’t ready to start training, and then because only two regional representatives and one other person, a male, showed up. All I got from the wasted day were copies of the materials from the national organization which included a very wordy proposed amendment. Perhaps it was because I was sort of overwhelmed by the length of the proposed amendment, but I pulled out a copy of the US Constitution which I had gotten many months ago and had put into my folder of story ideas for this newsletter. And what I found really amazed me. This is a word for word copy of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. (Italics are mine.) Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a state, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion of which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such state. Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability. Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for service in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave, but all such debts, obligations, and claims shall be held illegal and void. Section 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. I must confess that I am overwhelmed after having read this. I am ashamed that I never read this before, and am even more ashamed that those who claim knowledge of the law (I do not for myself!) have never brought it to light. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that if I am considered to be a person for purposes of the census, then I will automatically be considered a person in regards to receiving equal protection under the law. Since the Constitution itself is the basis of all of our law, then of course, it follows naturally that I have got equal rights under the constitution. Everyone else can do whatever they want to do, and my experience is that they surely will do exactly that, but since the United States Constitution already has the precise wording that I wanted in it, and frankly much more eloquently phrased than I could have done, then I certainly won’t waste another day on something that has existed for 128 years. I’ve been muttering it to my ceiling and my pets and my naval, and I may even have muttered it to one or two relatives or friends, that the women running the feminist movement were a bunch of imbeciles, and now, I am going to come out of the closet and say it straight out. The women running the feminist organizations are imbeciles. POTPOURRI FROM HERE AND THERE The January/February issue of MS. Magazine does have a more realistic article on the NGO Forum. I agree with their assessment that the Forum was worthwhile even though it had a lot of flaws. A very old item apparently got stuck between some books because it was very small. It dates from September of 1994 and comes from an interview of Norwegian Prime Minister Harlem Brundtland by Bonnie Erbe on To The Contrary. According to Bonnie, she was a powerful voice at the Cairo Population Conference. She talked about the year of leave at 80% pay for pregnancy in Norway. The leave is now being shared by both parents so employers can’t avoid it by hiring men only. A February 5, 1994 issue of the Des Moines Register contains many letters to the editor about a series in that publication about the way in which science is taught to girls and the gender gap between boys and girls in the sciences. Apparently, the series ran for several weeks prior to that date. I have a note that I wrote myself about a South Dakota NOW newsletter which contained a letter from someone asking that a male word be made up to be the counterpart for “Femi-Nazi” (popularized by our nemeses, Rush Limbaugh). I wrote them and told them that there already is one. The masculine of “Femi-Nazi” is “Nazi.” They did not print my letter, but did print some information about the Nazis which relates them strongly with the American Conservatives, one aspect of which I had mentioned in my letter, the “Pro-Life” orientation of the Nazis. Rush Limbaugh and others are experts at this tactic, using a red herring to divert attention from themselves. They know how closely their politics are to Adolf Hitler’s. They are trying to pin that label on their arch-enemy — the feminist — when no label could be further from the truth. But “truth” is not in their vocabulary. An organization called Catalyst surveyed senior female executives and male CEO’s to try to find out why only 5% of Senior Executives are women although half the college graduates and more than half MBA graduates are women. Almost all women executives said that they were forced to adopt male attitudes in order to succeed. They mentioned interest in sports and playing golf. They also said that they had to put their careers first, leaving their houses messy. The male CEO’s instead blamed the discrepancy on women’s tendency to work in human resources for their failure to move into upper management. Practically all the women were married and two-thirds of them had children. I believe I may have mentioned that when I was working as a Computer Programmer in San Francisco, when I asked a computer operator to hang a certain tape on a specific drive, he answered, “Yes Sir,” and went obediently to do it. That shocked me to my core. I had been so successful at adopting male attitudes, he actually addressed me as a man. They also found that 95% of the families at the top income-wise are married couples, both of whom work. More than half of the families at the bottom are headed by single parent women. I normally make a notation as to where I found, read or saw the news item, but in this case I did not. I believe that it was on a television news magazine. I apologize for this omission. Kudos to Public Television for the airing of a series about a Victorian English woman who became a doctor. The title of the series was Bramwell, and starred Jemma Redgrave and David Calder as Dr. Eleanor Bramwell and her father, Dr. Robert Bramwell. Just how authentic this story is was not discussed. But it seemed to me to have been well researched, and included a picture of Victorian society which seemed very similar to that depicted by Dickens. Victorian attitudes towards women, poverty, medicine, and relationships were also addressed. The feisty Eleanor apparently was an early female bike rider as well as an early physician. FROM JAPAN Dateline NBC carried a segment on March 13, 1996 about Japanese women who are routinely being exposed to fondling when traveling to and from work. One Japanese man brags of having fondled 20,000 women, and has published a book on fondling techniques. He is regarded as an amusing crank by Japanese men. He wants to translate his book into English in the United States. I imagine it will be a best seller. In Osaka, the transit employees have been trying to police this problem but because the punishments are so insignificant, they feel helpless. They have started running trains with cars for women only. Having had the same experience in Germany in crowded trolleys, I can tell you that it is very humiliating to be publicly fondled, but I am a little bit curious as to the severity of the response to the school girl being raped by US service men in Okinawa. It seems that such treatment should not be so shocking if fondling is ignored in their own culture. The man mentioned above was especially proud of fondling school girls. I suspect that it was, like many things in our own society, politically motivated, rather than being a genuine outpouring against the treatment of a woman. RESOURCES Going through my materials to put together this issue for the Wash Rag, I found a number of publications which might be interesting to some readers. A list follows, with the publisher or distributor in parenthesis after it. 1. Employment Discrimination and Women in South Dakota (South Dakota Advisory Committee to the U. S. commission on Civil Rights) 2. Employment — Sexual Harassment Resource Kit (NOW) 3. Walking the Corporate Fine Line — Sexual Harassment (NOW) 4. Project Respect — Ending Sexual Harassment in the Schools and Work places (NOW) 5. The Glass Half Empty (NOW) 6. Equality Issues in South Dakota Women’s Employment (South Dakota Committee to the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights 7. Don’t Work in the Dark U. S. Labor Department 8. ERA Draft Proposal (NOW) 9. Hillary Clinton’s Address to the NGO Plenary in Huairou, China, September 6, 1995 10. Five publications discussing sexual harassment and legal cases in Australia, also pamphlets (Australian Human Rights Commission) 11. United Nations Platform of Action from Fourth World Conference on Women (Fourth World Conference on Women) 12. United States Commitments announced at the Fourth World Conference on Women (US Department of State) 13. Violence Against Women (World Bank) 14. Peace or Pieces, non-violent parenting Handbook (Australia) 15. Women’s Situation in Japan (Japanese University Students) 16. Forum 95 —Re-publication of NGO Forum Newspapers (International Women’s Tribune Center) AND IN SOUTH DAKOTA Through an acquaintance, I found out that his wife had been sexually harassed in her work place. I asked him if he minded if I talked to her, and he said “no,” so I recently called her and talked to her. She did not wish that either her name or the name of the company be used, and she did confirm that she had been sexually harassed. The harassment consisted of personal comments, watching her all of the time, and constantly being around her. After she had let him know that she did not appreciate his constant attention, she did report him to her superior, and he was put on notice that his actions would not be tolerated and that he would be fired if he did it again. Unfortunately, the story did not stop there. He did not harass her again, but soon afterwards, one of her fellow employees grabbed her in an intimate manner. She told him that if he did this again, that she would report him. Since another woman witnessed the event, and later told her that she should have just reported him, she seems to be in a good position. However, I did warn her that there seemed to be a pattern of harassment developing, and that if any more instances of harassment occurred, she should be on guard that she was being targeted. Since I believe that she has worked for this employer for quite a while, it could be that because she has a good work record she may be up for a promotion. If so, someone else might be trying to give management the impression that she is a trouble maker so they will get the promotion. It is also possible that they want to get rid of her so someone else can have her position. Perhaps management is trying to get rid of her because she is older and is getting paid more than someone younger they might hire or because of her age she will cause their insurance premiums to go up. We wish her the best, because the company she works for has the reputation of paying quite well, and jobs of that kind are not easy to come by in this area. Are you an older women who can’t take estrogen therapy for osteoporosis? It may be helpful for you to eat tofu, a bean curd product available in the produce department.è Although bean curd is a tasteless and unappetizing food item, it can be added to some of your regular foods without having too much effect on the taste. Try buying the firm variety and adding thin strips to a bowl of soup or salad. è But the most palatable meal made with tofu is to saute small cubes in the frying pan before adding scrambled eggs. Makes the eggs very edible without being pasty, and it may help you assimilate calcium. The WASH RAG is published by Women Against Sexual Harassment, P. O. Box 164, Canton, South Dakota 57013-0164. ISSN 1068-2449. Subscription price is $10.00 a year. Copyright 1996 Tesseract Publications.