High Court Gets Case of Whether Women Must Trade Fertility for Jobs : Health: The company says it is protecting fetuses from lead poisoning. But workers claim bias in their exclusion from positions that pay better salaries.

Every day, Gloyce Qualls lives with a cruel choice she made six years ago: She traded her fertility for her job. She felt agony then; she feels anger now.

“I regret it all the time,” she said. “It’s something I had to do to keep my job. I wouldn’t do it again. I’d tell them: ‘Take this job and shove it.’ ”

Qualls works at Milwaukee-based Johnson Controls Inc., the nation’s largest auto battery manufacturer, whose policy of barring fertile women from potentially risky jobs has triggered debate from the factory floor up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

On Wednesday, labor and business clash in the high court over big issues--civil rights, privacy, safety, women in the workplace--and big stakes. By one estimate, 20 million jobs could be off limits to females.

“It’s an enormously important case,” said Ellen Vargyas, an attorney at the National Women’s Law Center. “We have women moving into the work force, making some gains. It could be a major setback.”

International Union et al. vs. Johnson Controls--called possibly the most important sex-discrimination case in decades--focuses on one four-letter word: lead. The raw material, used in auto batteries, is a potential hazard to fetuses and the basis for Johnson’s 8-year-old fetal-protection policy.

That policy does not encourage women to have themselves sterilized and, in fact, Johnson says it strongly advises against it. But Qualls said she had a tubal ligation to qualify for a higher-salary job because “I needed the money, frankly.”

Johnson says banning women who can bear children from jobs in high-lead areas is protection. But the United Auto Workers, representing many of the workers, says it is prejudice.

It violates civil rights, the UAW contends, and relegates women to lower-paying jobs with little chance for promotion.

“It’s plainly sex discrimination,” said Joan Bertin of the American Civil Liberties Union in New York City. “If you have a health and safety problem, you fix the workplace, not the worker. If something made your spleen become infected at work, you wouldn’t say: ‘We’ll only take workers who don’t have spleens.’ ”

Men, some of whom work with their wives at Johnson’s 13 battery plants, also face lead hazards, workers note.

“If it was health, they would be concerned about all people,” argued Judy Seymore, a Milwaukee worker. “I think the woman is a scapegoat.”

In fact, one man is a named plaintiff in the class-action suit; he sought to reduce his lead levels because he intended to become a father.

Scientists have linked reduced male fertility and high lead exposure, but Johnson notes that there are no conclusive studies on a father’s impact on a fetus.

Johnson, which has spent $15 million on improvements from 1979-85, argues that conditions are safe for men and women, but not for unborn children.

Doctors say that low lead levels can cause premature babies and minor birth defects and that high doses can be devastating.

“We think it would be wrong to knowingly expose fetuses to physical harm. That is the No. 1 overwhelming issue why that policy is in place,” Johnson spokeswoman Denise Zutz said. “The goal is for there not to be a single tragedy.”

The ban applies to all fertile women--not just those pregnant--because lead can remain in the body for long periods, Zutz said.

Johnson also dismisses accusations that it is motivated by fears of lawsuits.

“Having shareholders, it would be wrong of us not to be aware of that concern,” but that is not Johnson’s guiding principle, Zutz said.

“They were acting out of the purest motives,” said Stephen Bokat, general counsel at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, one of several business, religious and industrial groups supporting Johnson. “It wasn’t somebody’s idea to get rid of women.”

If not the intent, it’s the result, workers contend. They say there is little incentive to join Johnson since fertile women now hired are ineligible for top-scale jobs at the company’s 13 plants, located in California, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Oregon, Texas, Vermont and Wisconsin.

Though Johnson says that fewer than 20 women were transferred when the policy became mandatory and that all retained their salaries, workers say they lost overtime, shift differentials and promotion opportunities.

“I have been denied the pay potential I am capable of earning because I am a woman,” said Catherine Voeltner, 32, of Milwaukee. Three years ago, she said, some men in lead areas earned $9 to $10 an hour, whereas she made $5.50 and had more seniority.

“It makes me mad, very mad,” said Voeltner, an 11-year Johnson employee. “A lot of women out there are losing $100 a week in take-home pay. That’s a lot of money when you’re trying to raise a family.”

Other women say they have been stripped of their dignity.

Virginia Green, a Bennington, Vt., worker, was 50 and long done with childbearing when she was transferred to a glorified laundry job. “Was I angry? You’d better believe it,” she said. She considered sterilization but said her doctor told her it was too dangerous.

This is not the first protest of such rules. At least 15 major corporations have fetal protection policies, and lawsuits have been filed by hospital technicians, factory and auto workers, the ACLU says. Among the companies with such policies are General Motors Corp., Monsanto Corp. and duPont.

In 1983, the ACLU reached an out-of-court settlement in a discrimination suit against American Cyanamid Co. on behalf of several women workers at a West Virginia plant.

Five women were sterilized to keep their jobs in a paint pigments section, which closed within two years of their surgery, the ACLU’s Bertin said.

Betty Riggs, then a 26-year-old mother facing divorce and helping to support her ailing parents, is haunted by her sterilization.

“I’ve wished a hundred million times I could change what happened,” she said. “Me and my (second) husband could have had a family of our own. We never will. They deprived us of a normal family life.”

Qualls, 41, has similar feelings.

“Sometimes I see a lady pregnant my age . . . I get mad at myself for doing it,” she said. “Sometimes I feel bad, and I say: ‘Well, I did what I had to do.’ ”

Qualls is uncertain whether staff reductions or the policy prompted her transfer from a high-lead area, but when the chance arose to return to that department, she could not if she was fertile.

She was in her mid-30s and about to be married to a man with four children. Though they wanted a baby together and she had received some money to compensate for the transfer, “bringing home less than $200 a week wasn’t going to make it; it wasn’t going to pay the bills,” she said.

Her husband, Ike--who also works at the plant--her friends and her sister all opposed the surgery.

“It’s very unfair,” she said recently, bouncing her granddaughter on her knee. “The company ought not to have nothing to do with your body.”

These controversial choice and reproduction issues already have been debated in court, with conflicting rulings.

This year, the California Supreme Court upheld a ruling against Johnson in which a lower court said, in part: “We are in an era of choice. A woman is not required to become a Victorian brood mare.”

But in 1989, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals supported Johnson, saying it is “reasonably necessary to the industrial safety-based concern of protecting the unborn child from lead exposure.”