Class Action: The Landmark Case that Changed Sexual Harassment Law - Softcover

Bingham, Clara; Gansler, Laura Leedy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385496133 ISBN 13: 9780385496131

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

The true story of Lois Jenson, a petite single mother, who was among the first women hired by a northern Minnesota iron mine in 1975. In this brutal workplace, female miners were relentlessly threatened with pornographic graffiti, denigrating language, stalking, and physical assaults. Terrified of losing their jobs, the women kept their problems largely to themselves—until Lois, devastated by the abuse, found the courage to file a complaint against the company in 1984. Despite all of the obstacles the legal system threw at them, Lois and her fellow plaintiffs enlisted the aid of a dedicated team of lawyers and ultimately prevailed. Weaving personal stories with legal drama, Class Action shows how these terrifically brave women made history, although not without enormous personal cost. Told at a thriller’s pace, this is the story of how one woman pioneered and won the first sexual harassment class action suit in the United States, a legal milestone that immeasurably improved working conditions for American women.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Clara Bingham is a former White House correspondent for Newsweek and wrote Women on the hill: Challenging the Culture of Congress. She has written for Talk, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and The Washington Monthly. She is a graduate of Harvard University.

Laura Leedy Gansler is a lawyer specializing in alternative dispute resolution and securities law. She is a former adjunct law professor at American University. After graduating from Harvard University, Gansler received a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1989.

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A petite single mother, Lois Jenson was among the first women hired by a northern Minnesota iron mine in 1975. In this brutal workplace, female miners were relentlessly threatened with pornographic graffiti, denigrating language, stalking, and physical assaults. Terrified of losing their jobs, the women kept their problems largely to themselves--until Lois, devastated by the abuse, found the courage to file a complaint against the company in 1984. Despite all of the obstacles the legal system threw at them, Lois and her fellow plaintiffs enlisted the aid of a dedicated team of lawyers and ultimately prevailed. Weaving personal stories with legal drama, Class Action shows how these terrifically brave women made history, although not without enormous personal cost. Told at a thriller's pace, this is the story of how one woman pioneered and won the first sexual harassment class action suit in the United States, a legal milestone that immeasurably improved working conditions for American women.

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CHAPTER ONE

The Mine

March 1975

It snowed all day and night on Sunday. By dawn, three feet of snow covered the Mesabi Iron Range. Lois Jenson warmed her delicate hands on her coffee mug as she looked out the window of her small house in Virginia, Minnesota. She glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall: 6:15. She drank the last of her coffee and set the mug in the sink. It was Monday, March 25, 1975, Lois's first day of work at Eveleth Mines. If she didn't want to be late, she had better give herself some extra time. The day shift started at 7:00 a.m. In this weather, it would not be a twenty-minute trip.

Luckily, her turquoise Ford Maverick rode high over the road, and though she had to inch along on Highway 37, she could clear most of the snow on the two-lane road, which cut a straight line through the austere landscape of aspen, birch, and jack pine. In the distance she could make out the three twenty-story stacks of the mine's Forbes Fairlane Plant, each mounting a tall white column of smoke in the bitter northern Minnesota sky.

At the town of Forbes she turned onto the long drive leading to the plant. Up ahead, a man flagged her down. She saw his pickup buried in a snow drift and when she discovered that he, too, was on his way to the plant, she gave him a ride. His name was Clarence Mattson. He told Lois he was an electrician and that he'd worked at Eveleth for ten years. He seemed like a decent guy, and he mentioned that the men were bellyaching about how, starting today, they had to behave themselves and clean up their language. He showed her where to park in the employee lot and where she should enter the enormous plant. The truth was, she felt relieved to be arriving at this place accompanied. The closer she got, the more it looked to her like a steel monster with tentacles jutting out from all sides. But, she thought, as she stepped out of the Maverick and into her new life as an iron miner, "If everyone's this friendly, I'm going to like this job."

As Lois and Mattson walked the fifty yards uphill to the main building, they were quickly joined by dozens of men. Most of them were streaming out of the building, dirty and tired after working the midnight shift; the rest were arriving to punch in for the day. Lois noticed that these guys were staring at her. She was twenty-seven years old, with shoulder-length wavy blond hair, blue eyes, and pale, clear skin--a Scandinavian beauty with a slender waist and an elegant long neck. She was used to feeling men's eyes upon her, but this time it was different. It felt as if the men had never seen a woman before.

Lois hurried into the trailer Mattson said was serving as the women's changing room while the mine built its four new female miners a permanent "dry"--a term left over from the days when miners worked deep underground, often in several feet of water. The "dry house" was where they changed into their clean clothes at the end of a shift. Because of the snow, Lois's three female colleagues hadn't made it to their first day of work, so she found herself alone in the small, barely heated room. The starkness of the quarters startled her: twelve steel lockers, a table, four chairs, and a shower, sink, and toilet stall, none of which worked on account of the cold. Waiting for her in the locker room was a white hard hat with a blue stripe and the name jenson printed on the brim in block letters, a pair of men's size six Red Wing work boots, and clunky plastic protective glasses. In the unheated room, she changed into thermal underwear, a sweatshirt, a down vest, gray-and-blue striped coveralls she had bought the day before, the boots, plastic protective glasses, and hard hat. She stood in front of the mirror over the sink and burst out laughing--the person in the mirror looked like an auto mechanic, not a mother. Lois held her breath for a few seconds and walked out into the plant, where her first task was to go on a tour.

The Forbes Fairlane Plant evoked fear in a newcomer. Dominated by four cavernous buildings, the fine crusher, the surge, the concentrator, and the pellet plant, the facility sprawled over 2.3 million square feet--as if all 102 floors of New York's Empire State Building (2.1 million square feet) were spread end to end across the snowy Iron Range. That didn't even include the Thunderbird Mine, two open pits devouring 8,600 acres, from which spewed the iron ore-rich taconite rock that was mined. The plant operated 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and consumed 70 megawatts of electricity per hour--about as much as the neighboring cities of Virginia, Eveleth, and Hibbing combined. The year the women started, the management of Eveleth Mines had ordered Forbes Fairlane's production capacity be expanded from 2.4 million tons of taconite pellets a year to 6 million tons. Everywhere she looked, Lois could see construction crews at work upgrading and enlarging the facilities.

Taconite rocks contain between 20 and 30 percent iron ore, a foreman explained to her. The taconite was blasted out of "the pit," as everyone called Thunderbird, which was located nine miles away, on the outskirts of the town of Eveleth. There, the boulders were loaded into trucks and brought to the pit's "primary crusher," where they were broken down to the size of footballs. A long line of railroad freight cars transported the rocks from the pit to the plant. The taconite was then carried by conveyor belt to the fine crusher--the first stop in a long, pulverizing process--where the rocks were ground into taconite gravel.

The crusher was outfitted with eighty-foot-high rock-crushing machines and a dizzying maze of conveyor belts. Before she could even take in the scene, Lois was gagging from the black dust that filled the air, like thick smoke in a crowded bar. She could barely distinguish one thunderous machine from another as she struggled to adjust her eyes to the haze. Sticky dust coated her exposed skin and hair, suffocating her. Even more disorienting was the noise. The crusher spoke in a giant, booming voice and the constant smashing of the rocks in the teeth of the machines made earplugs mandatory. Because the dust contained cancer-causing silica, the men also wore white paper masks over their mouths. The earplugs and the mask plunged Lois into a kind of isolation she had never experienced in a workplace before.

She was grateful for the relative peace of the concentrator, her next stop on the tour, until its foreman, John Maki, led her up to the building's catwalks. Unaccustomed to the weight of her work boots, Lois could barely lift her legs as she and Maki climbed higher. The clunky metatarsal guards on top of the boots kept catching as she stepped from one platform to another. Until now she had not known that she was afraid of heights. Skyscrapers in Minneapolis had never bothered her. But now she couldn't bring herself to walk to the edge of the grated catwalk and look straight down ten stories.

The first purpose of the concentrator was to grind the gravel to a sandlike consistency, using rod mills, which were large rolling tubes containing steel rods. Another set of revolving drums filled with magnets then separated the iron-bearing grains of ore, or "concentrate," from the waste rock, or "tailings." After passing through the crusher and the concentrator by way of a labyrinth of conveyor belts, the wet concentrate arrived at its final destination, the pellet plant.

The dirt here was overwhelming. The air, walls, and floors in the pellet plant were filled and coated with black soot the consistency of flour. Her every step left a footprint as she walked out of the service elevator on the top floor of the building and gazed down 100 feet at a panorama of revolving steel machines all lined up in rows like dryers in a monstrous Laundromat. These were...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2003
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0385496133
• ISBN 13: 9780385496131
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 400
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar