Not Just Blacks Backing Rights Bill--Ask Alan Gersman : Discrimination: Jewish businessman sues over lost contract. He finds himself out in cold under current law.

Alan Gersman is a middle-aged, middle-class white man who never dreamed he would need the protections offered by federal civil rights laws.

But in 1988 he lost an important computer records storage contract, and he believes it was because he is Jewish.

Group Health Assn. stored software with Gersman’s company for four years and expressed consistent satisfaction with the firm’s services, court records say. But the contract was canceled shortly after an Egyptian employee, prompted by an Iranian supervisor, asked Gersman if he were Jewish.

“It was the first time in my life when I could really identify with a black person,” said Gersman, 51, co-owner of Computer Security International in suburban Washington. “I’m really not used to being discriminated against.”

That was only the first shock. The next came when a federal court threw out a lawsuit he filed against GHA. The primary reason: A 1989 Supreme Court ruling that an important post-Civil War civil rights statute, while it protected against bias in hiring, did not cover on-the-job discrimination.

Gersman said he found it hard to believe he had no recourse. “That type of thing is so basic,” he said. “I don’t know how you could have liberty and the pursuit of happiness” without it.”

Gersman, now appealing his case, is one of the human faces behind the Civil Rights Act of 1990. The bill was passed by the House and Senate and is headed toward an uncertain fate this fall at the White House.

The legislation is designed to reverse or supersede several restrictive Supreme Court rulings on discrimination, including the one that helped thwart Gersman’s suit. The bill would also give many more discrimination victims the right to sue for punitive and compensatory damages; that route currently is open only to victims of racial bias.

Civil rights advocates have fought passionately for the bill and at least one respected member of Congress--civil rights movement veteran Democrat John Lewis of Georgia--says he will not campaign for anyone who opposed it. But commercial interests and conservatives, including President Bush, contend the bill could lead to quotas and business-busting damage payments.

Compromise has proven elusive through months of negotiations, but a last-minute agreement is not out of the question. Bush would much rather sign the bill than veto it and risk alienating the minority groups he has been trying to court.

While blacks come to mind as the most obvious beneficiaries of stronger civil rights laws, they certainly would not be the only ones. For it is incorrect to assume, as Gersman did, that “people have the option to do whatever they want to do . . . where they’re qualified to do the work. Nobody thinks twice about it.”

Studies commissioned by an array of civil rights groups document job environments that are hostile to women, racial minorities or certain religious groups. They also describe the many holes, actual and prospective, that victims can fall through when they try to obtain legal relief, along with writings by judges who say their hands have been tied by the Supreme Court.

Carol Zabkowicz of Racine, Wis., was one victim. She endured three years of sexual harassment so severe that her doctor ordered a two-month medical leave during her second pregnancy in order to ease stress-related gastrointestinal problems and avert a miscarriage.

“There were verbal assaults from some male employees. They called me a variety of names, they asked me to do sexual acts. There were caricatures of myself posted around the warehouse--either nude graffiti or myself engaged in sexual acts with animals or human beings,” Zabkowicz, 35, recalled of her employment at a West Bend appliances distribution warehouse.

A federal judge rejected the company’s depiction of the problem as a personality clash and said Zabkowicz had been the victim of “sustained, malicious and brutal harassment” that was “malevolent and outrageous.” He also said supervisors were well aware of the harassment but did not stop it.

The penalty for all of this amounted to a $2,763 check from West Bend to Zabkowicz--back pay for her two-month medical leave. There was no legal avenue to pursue damages for pain, suffering or medical and psychiatric bills, leaving Zabkowicz with what she considered a hollow victory.

“It just seems outrageous that in 1990 this stuff still goes on,” Zabkowicz said. “Punitive and compensatory damages would be a strong deterrent to make certain that this does not happen.”

Gary Mason, a cooler repairman at a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Lenexa, Kan., is black and therefore eligible to file for such damages under current law. But he was unable to pursue them because the new Supreme Court restrictions on workplace protection.

“I was the first black repairman ever hired in the position I had in the cooler department,” recalled Mason, 35. “Naturally, I started experiencing a lot of racial slurs and remarks and jokes. I was denied promotions, reprimanded for things that I didn’t do. From day one, it was a bad atmosphere. The boss didn’t even shake my hand.”