Ex-Labor Secretary Continues Battle Against Discrimination
When former Labor Secretary Lynn Martin first saw news reports about sexual harassment allegations at a Mitsubishi auto plant in Illinois, she was reminded of the unfair attitude many rape victims face: that they must have asked for it.
And when Mitsubishi Motor Manufacturing of America executives phoned her Chicago office for help, she planned to pass.
Martin, who was in Stockholm at a conference for female leaders when the call came, figured they would want her to manage the fallout from a federal lawsuit filed in April by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and a private suit filed in 1994 by a group of female workers. The workers alleged that they had been subjected to grabbing, groping, sexual graffiti and lewd comments.
“If they thought what they were going to get was someone to talk the talk to restore their image, they’d be wrong,” she said in a recent interview.
Instead, Mitsubishi, which has denied any wrongdoing but realizes it must do some serious fence mending, asked the former Illinois congresswoman to conduct a comprehensive review of its workplace policies. She could sit down with workers at the Normal, Ill., facility and have free rein to look into such issues as sexual harassment, diversity and discrimination. Now, that was appealing.
With sexual harassment claims soaring from Wall Street to Walla Walla, Wash., Martin’s mandate comes at a pivotal time. Men and women are mixing more and more in corporate offices and on factory floors, and the perhaps inevitable tensions are boiling over into headline news.
The issue took center stage five years ago with Anita Hill’s futile challenges to Clarence Thomas’ confirmation as a Supreme Court justice. Since then, sexual harassment complaints to the EEOC have more than doubled, to nearly 15,700 in 1995. Aside from the Mitsubishi investigation--the EEOC’s biggest case to date--problems have surfaced at such disparate organizations as Smith Barney Inc., the venerable Wall Street investment firm, and Astra USA Inc., a Swedish-owned drug company.
Martin has taken the issue seriously for years. As labor secretary for President Bush, she instituted a sexual harassment awareness program for 17,000 department employees--well before the duel between Hill and Thomas (whose nomination Martin unwaveringly supported). She served as the first chairwoman of the federal Glass Ceiling Commission and now heads an effort by consulting firm Deloitte & Touche aimed at promoting women.
Although some critics have labeled Martin’s current assignment a blatant public relations ploy, she views it as a rare chance to help improve the climate of a workplace to ensure that male and female workers alike have “the best jobs they can.”
“It is an incredible look forward for a company, and we’re going to do it on an incredibly accelerated time schedule,” she said, adding that she expects to develop a long-term plan by year-end. “And we’re being public about it, which again adds to the risk. If they don’t do some of the things [they vow to do], obviously people are going to know about it.”
Martin, who said she is charging “exactly what a man would charge” to take on the task, will steer clear of delving into details in the sexual harassment cases.
Mitsubishi clearly needed a strategy for getting back on track after its initial response to the EEOC lawsuit backfired. After the suit was announced in April, the company bused 3,000 employees from the southern Illinois plant to Chicago for a demonstration outside EEOC offices. To some, the effort created the impression that Mitsubishi coerced workers into showing their support--and discouraged the female workers involved in the harassment case.
Martin said she does not want to divide people.
“This was a clarion call,” she said. “No matter what happens in a particular place, it is first of all EEOC’s mandate to look into these [allegations]. I hope every company says, ‘Hey, let’s check this out.’
“I don’t know how successful we can be. Could I fail? The answer is yes. But if you don’t risk failure, you can never have success.”
The question will be whether Mitsubishi has the courage to act on Martin’s findings.
“They’ve taken a bold step in bringing her on,” said Steve Albrecht, a San Diego consultant and author of the book “Crisis Management for Corporate Self-Defense.” “It’s a question of whether they will take her recommendations and act on them immediately in a positive way.”
That, he added, “might not be what their lawyers recommend.”
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