The Workplace in the Year 6 A.A.

Six years ago this weekend, there was finally something on TV besides football and cartoons.

The televised Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings lasted only that one long weekend, just as the JFK assassination likewise consumed only one endless autumn weekend, yet both still take up a lifetime in our heads, both still register on the civic calendar as shift points of thought and conduct. The presidency was never the same after JFK, the workplace never the same after Anita Hill.

It would change, wouldn’t it? It had to; the country didn’t have the energy to wage this war of a thousand cuts again.

Yet in 1994--the year 3 A.A., After Anita, on the new sexual harassment calendar--a jury nailed a San Francisco law firm with $7 million in punitive damages over a partner who was allegedly in the habit of feeling a secretary’s breast and even dumped M&Ms; in her blouse pocket.

In the year 4 A.A., Chevron Corp. forked over $2.2 million to four California women who said they were being sent porn via company e-mail, and that when they complained, the company hassled them.

In the year 5 A.A., scores of women at a U.S. Mitsubishi plant said they were sexually insulted and subjected to obscene graffiti.

And you thought that pubic-hair-on-the-Coke-can moment was surpassingly gross.

We have had, since Hill-Thomas, six years to “get it,” or to at least get subtle about it.

What’s subtle about a man whose male boss at an L.A. record company allegedly kissed his employee’s ear and exposed himself? Or a postdoctoral dental student at a Southland university finding fellow students feigning sexual thrusting behind her back?

It is the year 6 A.A. Anita Hill has a book, Clarence Thomas has a judge’s robes for life, and as the Queen remarked to Alice, “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.”

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This has not been a top-10 summer for Disney, for reasons having nothing to do with box office. Disney has been slammed from all sides lately, boycotted by Baptists and the blind, assailed by Hispanics and hockey fans.

But Disney moves as slowly and inexorably as a glacier. As surely as small streams feed into wide rivers, the entire world will one day soon find itself under the ownership and trademark of one company, which I predict will be named McDisneySoft.

People expect better of Disney because it is Disney, Snow White Studios Inc. And this boycott summer also found Disney fighting rear-guard legal actions over sexual harassment.

In the first matter, women in Disney’s corporate credit and collections department sued over a man who supposedly lifted skirts, dropped his pants, played a lustful Santa at an office Christmas party, and mocked the idea of one heavyset employee and her husband making love as “two Shamus in thongs” to the alleged amusement of his woman supervisor.

In the second, an assistant to a technical official in Disney’s feature animation department found herself on the receiving end of his unwelcome attentions, among them a $2,500 diamond and sapphire necklace and perfume from his Paris trip when other employees got two boxes of chocolates to share. It made her a marked woman among colleagues. And when she complained to human resources, her attorney said, she was asked, “Well, are you sure you weren’t sleeping with him?”

The third case is still in court. Like the gender switcheroo in the Michael Crichton novel “Disclosure,” it was a woman at Buena Vista’s home video division who allegedly hit on a male employee--who, unbeknown to her, is gay. The superior, legal papers claimed, kept copping feels, and at a company fete, she virtually dragged him to the dance floor and was “all over” him. Shortly thereafter, he sued.

Sounds loony, doesn’t it? Oh, no, that’s another studio.

Here is what happened since:

The first woman lost her suit, and is appealing. In court, Disney and the defendant were linked: Either both were liable or neither. Jurors, among them government workers taught from Day 1 about sexual harassment, told the woman’s lawyer her client was believable but they felt the defendant was a victim too--of not having been trained in what is inappropriate behavior. The woman was recently fired after 13 years at Disney.

The second woman, recipient of the diamond necklace, paid off her therapy bills and other debts from a long stretch of unemployment, bought a new car, and returned home to Texas, like many in her circumstance just wanting to forget the whole thing. Her lawyer could not comment on a settlement.

In the third case, a jury ruled Thursday against the man who sued.

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The fastest-growing part of the economy is small business. The fastest-growing element of small business is women business owners, many of whom have given up on the corporate culture, whose glass ceiling kept them from getting ahead, and whose glass floor was how others looked up their skirts as they were trying to break through the glass ceiling.