Ruby Martinez, a divorced mother of two sons, knew she faced rough sledding at work when she became the first female mechanic at a soap factory in suburban Chicago in 1979. But she wasn't prepared for the hostile reception she received.
Almost immediately, she said in a recent interview, her male co-workers reacted angrily. They began threatening her, propositioning her, kissing her roughly and even slapping her when she rebuffed their advances, she said.
She was subjected to crude practical jokes, including the time a penis whittled out of pink soap was placed on her tool box. The message, she recalled, was that the men thought "if I didn't have that tool, I couldn't be a mechanic."
Now Martinez is one of more than 100 women prepared to testify of a years-long pattern of sexual harassment in a sweeping lawsuit the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed in 1999 against Dial Corp.
The EEOC is calling the case the largest since its landmark lawsuit against Mitsubishi Motor Manufacturing of America Inc., which involved hundreds of women at a Normal, Ill., automotive plant. It resulted in legal settlements for female workers totaling more than $44 million.
A federal judge ruled in August that the Dial suit can proceed to trial as a class action, which means that dozens of women may soon begin taking the stand to tell their stories of life on the job at the company.
U.S. District Judge Warren K. Urbom denied Dial's motion to have the case dismissed, saying the depositions by workers and EEOC filings indicate the work environment "was sexually charged in a way that was offensive and demeaning to women."
"We were disappointed by the judge's ruling," said Christopher J. Littlefield, senior vice president and general counsel at Dial, which is based in Scottsdale, Ariz.
Littlefield said the company does not tolerate discrimination or harassment. He said Dial will vigorously defend itself in court and has appealed the judge's ruling on the class-action issue. Last month, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to review it.
The Dial lawsuit is the most high-profile result of the continuing flow of sexual harassment claims filed each year with the EEOC. Seven years after the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas allegations placed the issue on the nation's front pages, nearly 16,000 sexual harassment complaints were filed at the agency in 2000, up slightly from the year before. The numbers have been roughly constant for the past six years.
American companies have spent millions of dollars in training programs to try to curb the problem. Attorneys for employers say conditions have improved. "There's a lot less obvious harassment," said Barbara Brown, one employment lawyer. "I think there's been progress."
But Ellen Bravo, executive director of 9to5, the National Association of Working Women, said sexual harassment remains the biggest single source of complaints from working women.
And Larry Organ, a lawyer who represents workers, said he thinks the problem reflects such deep-rooted cultural attitudes that no end is in sight. "It's in people's nature, unfortunately, and I don't think corporations have taken it seriously," Organ said. "Unfortunately, companies are willing to spend more money defending these cases than they'll spend educating and training their workforces to make sure it doesn't happen."
The EEOC suit accuses Dial of lacking effective policies to prevent harassment at its facility in Aurora, Ill.
"It is . . . difficult to imagine a more malicious, reckless and ineffective response to sexual harassment than that exhibited by Dial for years," the agency said in a court filing. "Women were blamed for sexual harassment and soon learned that complaining about it would only make their lives more difficult. Harassment occurred in the presence of supervisors who did nothing, and supervisors themselves engaged in harassment. Discipline for sexual harassment was either nonexistent or ineffective."
"Dial's paper sexual harassment policy was a pathetic joke," the filing added. "At one employee meeting to announce a Dial sexual harassment policy, a male employee felt free to begin yelling, 'Well, I'll tell you one [expletive] thing. Whoever turns me in and tries to cause me to lose my job is going to lose theirs, too,' and the supervisor did nothing."
Littlefield disputed the EEOC's version of events at the plant while noting that there have been management changes and that the alleged problems occurred "two management teams ago." He added: "There's been a lot of turnover at Dial. We think prior management properly dealt with behavior they were aware of."
"We can't state firmly enough that we don't have a sexual harassment problem at Dial," Littlefield said. "We are dealing with a problem we inherited 10 years ago."
In its court filings, the EEOC quoted deposition testimony from dozens of alleged victims and harassers, cited by numbers rather than names to preserve their privacy. At least five women, Nos. 67, 93, 96, 33 and 90, testified that male co-workers or supervisors had exposed themselves at work.
Worker 87, the EEOC said, had her shirt forcibly removed by a co-worker. Worker 99 testified that she was pinned against the wall by a co-worker, in front of other workers and supervisors, while he enacted a scene he had seen in a pornographic movie. Co-worker 24 told a woman that he could force her to become a prostitute.
The EEOC said that more than 40 supervisors and managers at the plant engaged in some form of sexual harassment, with many explicitly asking for sexual favors.
The manager labeled Supervisor Harasser 29, for example, testified about how the company had sponsored a "best breast" competition in which a photographer went around the plant taking pictures of women's chests, posted them on a bulletin board and held a vote to choose the winner.
It "was a motivation factor to try to keep the environment productive," Supervisor 29 told the EEOC. "It was trying to create an overall friendly productive environment."
Kathryn Aiken, a former manager at the Aurora plant who later became a plant manager in Omaha for Dial, said in an interview that in her experience sexual harassment was pervasive both on the factory floor and in executive suites.
She said she and other women reported incidents of harassment in the early 1990s, "and nothing was done." The company's anti-harassment policy, shesaid, "was a piece of paper on the wall. In all other ways, it was a free-for-all."
Aiken said she quit her position and filed a sex discrimination claim against the company with the EEOC in 1996 but dropped it after the agency told her the backlog of cases meant it could take up to three years to review her claim.
She said Dial executives also told her that "Dial has a long memory."
"I felt threatened," she said. "I withdrew my charge."
In his August ruling, Judge Urbom said the case would move through the courts as the Mitsubishi lawsuit did. That means the EEOC would first be required to prove that a pattern or practice of sexual harassment occurred. If it succeeded, he said, he would proceed to determining individuals' "entitlement to relief."
