Woman Got Fed Up at Work, Then Got Even--in Court

Week after next, Muriel Kraszewski of Fullerton will receive a check for $420,822, plus interest, from State Farm Insurance Co. Nobody died. No accident is being settled. The money represents what the U.S. District Court in San Francisco figures she lost as a State Farm employee by not being allowed to do what she does best: sell insurance--not as someone’s “Girl Friday” but as a full-fledged insurance sales agent.

The reason she was not allowed to do that, concluded the court, is because she is a woman, and State Farm was thus practicing sex discrimination. As a result of Kraszewski’s successful litigation, State Farm will now be required to adjudicate the sex discrimination claims of other women employees over the last 13 years, a process that may cost the firm upwards of $300 million in damages in California alone.

To say that Muriel Kraszewski doesn’t feel sorry for State Farm would be the understatement of the year. She is downright gleeful.

“Let me give you the number for those women to call to file a claim,” she said. “It’s 1 (800) 822-5000. State Farm has had to hire a bunch of lawyers and staff 4,000 square feet of office space to deal with the expected complaints. And all because they wouldn’t give women equal job opportunities with men until they were forced to.”

She pondered a moment, then added. “I think I did State Farm a favor. I opened up a whole new group of sales agents for them, so now they’ll have a much greater variety of employees to help them do a better job. I brought them into the 20th Century.”

She is an unlikely person to strike such a thundering blow for feminism. Kraszewski is a 52-year-old grandmother, raised in a Midwestern farm family with deeply conservative roots. “I’ve never seen myself as a feminist,” she said in the wonderfully direct way she talks. “I just wanted equal pay for equal work. I know I helped women, even though I didn’t start out to do that. In the beginning, I just wanted revenge.”

She got it--in spades--which illustrates the other side of Kraszewski. The grandmother image is accurate only until Kraszewski goes to work. Then she becomes the sharp, articulate, effective executive who appeared for a lunch interview. Trimly dressed, short hair, exuberant eyes, altogether in charge of herself and what she is saying. This is the woman who has become one of Farmers Insurance Group’s leading Southern California agents since she was denied that opportunity by State Farm.

Kraszewski is still very conscious of the roots that shaped her. Of sturdy Scandinavian stock, she was born and raised on a prosperous dairy farm about 70 miles north of Minneapolis. She went to business school in Chicago, then to work for the Santa Fe railroad there. That is when she met her husband, Robert, who was then a junior in college, studying optometry and worrying about the military draft. Muriel and Robert were married in 1954 and moved to Dearborn, Mich., where she worked for a mortgage company and he took additional schooling. When Robert passed the age limit for the draft, the couple decided to have a look at California before he set up his practice.

“Neither of us had ever been there,” Kraszewski recalled, “and we both wanted to see what it was like. We left in the middle of a snowstorm, and when we hit Los Angeles, we knew we’d never go back.”

While her husband took his boards before practicing in California, Muriel got pregnant. She spent the next six years being a homemaker while Robert worked for several clinics before going into business for himself in Yorba Linda, where he still practices today. Muriel, meanwhile, was restless.

“When (our son) Rob turned 7, he was in school from 8 to 5, and I was totally bored,” Kraszewski said. “I had to do something. So that’s when I went to work for two State Farm agents in Montebello--as a secretary and a sort of Gal Friday.”

She worked there six years, until the family moved to Anaheim and she tired of the commute. She took another job briefly, spent a summer in Minnesota helping her parents through an illness, then went to work for a State Farm agency in Whittier.

“It was in Whittier,” she said, “that I started thinking: Why don’t I do this for myself? I liked all the guys I worked for, and they treated me well, but I was doing most of the work and was earning $10,200 while they were making anywhere from seven to 10 times that much. So I figured if I’m doing everything anyway, why don’t I get my own agency.”

She started asking around, among the district and regional officials of State Farm. It was casual at first, and the answers she got were casual. She was told, she said, that a couple of widows of agents took over selling roles “and it didn’t work out.” She was also told that it was essential to go out at night and sell and that that wasn’t safe for a woman.

“You’ve got to understand,” said Kraszewski, “that I was raised to be pretty subservient. My mom has waited on my dad all his life, so it was hard for me to assert myself. But the injustice of it made me really angry. So I would talk to anybody who would listen. The agents I worked for would just smile, but the district and regional managers would pat me on the shoulder and tell me (essentially) to just be a good girl and keep on doing what I was already doing so well.”

That wasn’t good enough for Kraszewski, and she finally asked her district manager for an application for a sales agent’s job. She was told she would have to take a test first to see if she was qualified for sales. Her superiors couldn’t find a test for a while, but when she pressed them, they finally came up with one and she took it. Then she sweated out the results.

“That went on for a couple of months,” she recalled. “Men got an answer in a week. I didn’t know until it came out accidentally in court several years later that I had passed the test. All they told me then was that they didn’t know how to grade it because they didn’t have any composite for women.

“They waltzed me around for a year-and-a-half, although they were careful never to tell me I was getting this treatment because I was a woman. They’d just send me around to various district managers who would all have the same speech. Normally, new agents are given some prospective customer files to start with. The district managers would tell me they didn’t have any files, and I’d tell them I’d be happy to start from scratch. And then pretty soon, a man would be put on. Somehow, they found files for him. You had to be a WASP male to sell for State Farm.”

In 1974, State Farm agency secretaries and office managers were sent to a life insurance symposium, and, Kraszewski said, and “I found out there were a lot of other women in the same boat. We were being told how to sell life insurance for the men in our office who would get most of the income from our efforts.”

After that seminar, Kraszewski thought briefly about quitting and starting an employment agency. Instead, she decided to force the issue at State Farm by demanding an answer to her application for a sales job. She was summoned to the regional manager’s office, thinking she was finally going to be promoted. Instead, she was told that she needed a college degree to be considered. When she asked why she hadn’t been told that earlier, the answer was that this was a new rule. She was also told that she wasn’t qualified because she had never run her own business--and even if she qualified on all these counts, she would have to be relocated.

“I came out of that meeting very angry,” Kraszewski said. “No agent I’d ever worked for was a college graduate who had previously run his own business.”

Kraszewski didn’t nurse her anger. She acted. The next day she applied for a sales agent’s job with Farmers Insurance Group. And the day after that she went to the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to state her case against State Farm. The first action got immediate results; Farmers hired her on the spot. The second action took a little longer.

While she was building her own agency, Kraszewski sought out avenues for what she freely admits was at first “revenge.” The EEOC wouldn’t take her case because, they told her, they already had too many and they wanted to concentrate on the sure winners. So she tried the National Organization of Women and got the same response there. But NOW steered her to an attorney named Guy Saperstein, who specializes in class-action cases. He listened to Kraszewski, then took her case. It was filed on June 1, 1979, as a class-action suit on behalf of all women who had been discriminated against by State Farm because of their sex. Before it went to court, two other women joined Kraszewski as plaintiffs: Daisy Jackson, who had been made a trainee agent in Palo Alto by her grateful boss and was fired by his superior because she failed to meet a sales quota when she became seriously ill, and Wilda Tipton of Oxnard, who was still a State Farm “Gal Friday” when she heard about Kraszewski’s lawsuit. Tipton, also had been told that she needed a college education to work into sales, and she had almost attained a degree when she was told that she wouldn’t get the job anyway. Angry and ill from the stress of her disappointment, she threw in with Kraszewski and Jackson.

The case went to trial in February, 1982, in Federal District Court in San Francisco. Testimony continued for a year, and a decision was finally handed down in 1985 in favor of the plaintiffs. It took two more years of appeals and the assessment of penalties before the court last month ordered State Farm to pay $1.26 million in equal damages to the three plaintiffs and to establish a procedure to consider the claims of other California women who had been rejected for jobs as State Farm agents between July, 1974, and December, 1987.

By the time the final decision was handed down, Daisy Jackson was dead, and Wilda Tipton had become a victim of multiple sclerosis who said at the time of Jackson’s death in 1983, “I absolutely refuse to die until this is over”--a promise she has kept.

“I never saw anyone squirm like Daisy’s boss,” Kraszewski said, “when he was asked on the witness stand if he would have fired a man for not meeting a sales quota after a heart attack. State Farm’s lawyers couldn’t attack our competence. I have consistently been in the top three in sales in my district with Farmers--and only Daisy’s health kept her from the top. Wilda was doing the same thing I’d done for State Farm, building up the income of the agents she worked for.”

The money she will receive is a secondary consideration to Kraszewski--and, she says, always has been. Her husband has a lucrative practice, and Muriel has prospered in her Farmers agency. The couple already have homes in Mexico and at Lake Tahoe in addition to a Fullerton condominium they recently purchased. And last year, Muriel built a new home for her parents in a Swedish community in Minnesota. “My father is 88,” she said, “and it’s the first time he’s ever changed addresses.”

Life is good for Muriel Kraszewski. Her son is a practicing psychologist in Fullerton, married to “a wonderful woman. And they have given me this beautiful 16-month-old granddaughter named Mary Alexandra.”

So what do she and her husband plan to do with this windfall?

She shrugged. “Most of it will be put into investments. And a lot of it will go for taxes. It will be taxed as simple income this year.”