Free Labor Is No Station in Life

Caryn Suhr finally got paid for her work. Suhr and her husband, Mark, received more than $1 million to settle a federal lawsuit against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department alleging she was forced to work at the Gorman substation for no pay. Both sides were wise to settle the case, which exposed the subtle and overt pressures used by the Sheriff’s Department to squeeze free labor out of deputies’ wives.

For more than two years, Caryn Suhr answered phones, dispatched radio calls and cleaned jail cells at the remote facility. Her husband, a deputy, was assigned to the station in 1990. Along with the assignment came the assumption that his wife would take care of chores there. At the same time, the Suhrs paid no rent on the home provided for them by the department.

The arrangement had worked well enough with other couples for decades. But Caryn Suhr, who gave up a job to follow her husband to the new assignment, called it a discriminatory arrangement from the beginning. It was. Although a federal judge last year ruled that Caryn Suhr was a volunteer employee, the Sheriff’s Department made it clear that wives were expected to pitch in and work as hard as their paid husbands. Never mind about the free housing--law enforcement agencies elsewhere that staff remote stations provide free accommodations and pay wives for their work.

Since the Suhrs’ case was filed two years ago, the department has restructured operations at the Gorman station. An additional deputy has been assigned to the station and families no longer live on the compound. Wives are no longer expected to help out. That’s progress. But cases like the Suhrs’ should remind the department that times--and attitudes--change. It needs to change with them. Once upon a time, women may have been willing to work as unpaid scullery maids. But not in the 1990s.