Fired By Big Brother

Dow Chemical Co.’s factory in Midland, Mich., is crisscrossed by miles of pipes carrying toxic fluids. Workers wear goggles, helmets and sometimes rubber bodysuits. Emergency shower facilities are almost as common as drinking fountains. And every so often, sirens signal the entire town to shut its windows.

Workers pride themselves on foreseeing trouble. Even so, one hazard coursing through the plant last year caught everyone off guard, ending the careers of 39 workers and forcing 200 others to stay home from one to five days. It left the company and employees alike wondering how things managed to get so out of control.

The hazard? It was e-mail.

Most involved off-color jokes and cartoons. Some were pictures of undressed women. A small number were graphic depictions of sex and violence. For years, such e-mail had flowed freely in the plant. But when one worker complained of seeing offensive material on a terminal last May, it set off the largest-known crackdown on computer misuse in the U.S. workplace. The workers who lost their jobs are branded with computer-age scarlet letters. Pilloried in the media, and declared deviants by Dow, they’re finding that other companies won’t touch them. They have faced the humiliation of explaining to their families what happened, and financial strain has pushed some into bankruptcy. Months later, they still struggle to reconcile their beliefs and their behavior, to comprehend how their lives were upended by something as innocuous as e-mail. “I still sit there at 2 or 3 in the morning, thinking about this,” says John Blanck, 50, a machinist who was in his 25th year at Dow when he was fired. “If you want to believe I’m a pornography person or whatever, go ahead. But my morals have always been good. And I would never have even looked at e-mail if I thought it would have meant my job.”

Blanck was fired for sending illicit e-mail, including one that contained a picture of a nude man and female dwarf. These digital jokes and pictures were tasteless, and had nothing to do with his duties at Dow. In many ways, they were his computer-age contributions to a time-honored tradition. Dirty jokes and pictures have always been in the workplace, at Dow and virtually every company in America, whether whispered by the water cooler, stowed in briefcases or taped to the insides of lockers. Companies never condoned such behavior but were usually content to overlook it as long as it wasn’t inflicted on the unwilling.

Technology has torn apart this informal compact, giving rise to a new corporate puritanism. Until computers entered the workplace, offensive jokes were shared person to person, and complaints were rarely directed at more than one or two individuals at a time. Others might have repeated the joke, but they weren’t caught. Today, every joke, every photo, every cartoon sent by e-mail leaves a record, somewhere. A single complaint from one person who saw a single offensive cartoon can force a company, fearful of its potential liability, to review the company’s entire e-mail record.

This new reality has coincided with a decade of rising concern about sexual harassment in the workplace. So companies are policing workers’ private communications like never before--because they can, and because they can’t afford not to. Hundreds of workers have lost their jobs in recent years for similar offenses at Xerox Corp., the New York Times Co., Merck and many other companies.

At Dow last summer, a single complaint led to the crackdown. It involved more workers, some of whom were second- or third-generation Dow employees, than any other known case and it was the first to ensnare mostly blue-collar workers. They were men--and a few women--who worked on the factory floor, didn’t have computers at home and spent at most a few minutes a day in front of shared Internet terminals. The Dow case also was the first known case involving a union, the United Steelworkers, which is fighting to get the workers their jobs back.

For all involved, it was uncharted territory. Dow faced daunting management concerns. Clearly it’s not right for employees to swap sexually explicit or violent e-mail at work. But is it right to fire them? Dow had overlooked such behavior for years. Most of the workers involved had superb records and had given decades of their lives, and sometimes even pieces of their flesh, to their jobs.

The union had never seen so many members summarily fired or suspended over a disciplinary matter in its 100-year history. Union officials have questions of their own, starting with why union members represent only one of every five Dow workers in Midland, but 32 of the 39 who were fired. The legal fight is scheduled to get underway with a hearing before an administrative law judge on Jan. 29.

Management experts say Dow’s response is one of the most aggressive they’ve seen. “This is a new area and companies are making policy on the go,” says David Lewin, a professor of human resources at UCLA. “But companies do not generally terminate employees on the first abuse. Most start with warnings.”

Dow executives say they handled the case correctly, and felt they had to take a moral stand. “This was very thoroughly reviewed by a series of management levels,” says Mike Parker, chief executive of Dow. “This is a wonderful company. It’s got great values.”

*

HERBERT H. DOW TRAVELED TO MIDLAND IN 1888 TO STUDY ITS unusually briny soil. Soon he was supplying bromine to the growing photography industry. Today the company he founded has $19 billion in revenue and facilities in 32 countries. Dow’s headquarters, and much of its wealth, have stayed in Midland, a town of 38,000 people located “in the palm of the mitten,” to use a Michigan geographic metaphor. It is hard to overstate Dow’s influence. The Dow name is everywhere: the Dow Library, the Dow gardens, the Dow homestead, the Dow museum and the Dow studio. On one side of town is Dow High School. On the other is Midland High, whose team name is “the Chemics.”

Company executives live in opulent homes, golf at the Midland Country Club and buy season tickets to the Midland Symphony Orchestra. Dow factory workers have prospered, too. Most make upward of $20 an hour, with annual incomes that can reach six figures with overtime. They spend their paychecks on motorcycles and snowmobiles and hunting trips. In a region all too familiar with the decline of the auto industry, getting hired at Dow has always been a golden ticket.

“It was a big deal,” says Tom Pembroke, 46, who joined Dow’s packaging department in 1989. “They made you feel like ‘Welcome to the family. We want someone here for the rest of their working career.’ It was an incredible feeling.” Workers viewed their careers with such certainty that they began calculating retirement income almost from the moment they arrived. None believed they would ever be fired, right up to the moment they were.

The first taps on the shoulder came in July, when dozens of workers were summoned to the Dow administration building. They were confronted with incriminating e-mail from their files, suspended for two weeks and told to call in every day for updates. Their hearts would pound as they dialed in each morning. When they were finally summoned back near the end of their suspensions, many assumed they were to return to work. Some, including Pembroke, braced for the worst they could imagine: suspensions that would be measured in months.

But the scene at the administration building told a different story. One by one, workers emerged with glazed looks. In the parking lot, women consoled sobbing husbands. Some workers were so distraught that the union had to round up volunteers to drive them home.

Pembroke says that as he sat down for his meeting, his longtime supervisor avoided eye contact and began reading a terse termination letter. “You guys are making a mistake,” Pembroke pleaded. “I used bad judgment. Consider my record!” He drove the 15 miles back to his Bay City home in a stupor. His wife was still asleep in bed when he rushed to the bathroom and vomited.

Pembroke was fired for sending an e-mail depicting a woman apparently engaged in a sex act with a horse. “It was like a life sentence for a first-time offense,” he says. In the months since, he has gone from making $22 an hour as a head operator at Dow to $6.25 dismantling old mobile homes. At Dow he was responsible for millions of dollars of equipment. Now he rips out carpet, paneling and plumbing.

*

DOW HAS ALWAYS HAD SPLIT PERSONALITIES in Midland. North of U.S. 10, the highway that cuts through town, is the leafy corporate campus populated by executives with advanced degrees and office knickknacks from their stints at Dow locations around the globe. South of the highway is the plant, a forest of silos, tanks, pipes, pumps and metal-sided buildings. Workers there are a bit like cooks in a giant kitchen, churning compounds with unpronounceable names into Saran Wrap, lawn pesticides and Twinkies additives.

Like a lot of blue-collar workplaces, the plant has never been a bastion of political correctness. Sexist jokes and racy pictures have always been abundant. Ned Brandt, Dow’s corporate historian, recalls arriving at the plant in 1953 and finding pinups and girlie calendars. “There was kind of a contest around the plant [among supervisors] to have the sexiest calendar in your office,” Brandt says. “Word would get around that Charlie or George had a real dandy.”

For decades, empty lockers were stocked with Playboys for restroom reading. When copy machines arrived, workers used them to churn out dirty cartoons, jokes, pictures and caricatures of bosses that would be tacked to bulletin boards or passed out on lunchroom tables. Some employees have collections of the material dating back decades. Ken Lumbert, 50, a Dow employee for 31 years who has thousands of pages of material stuffed in binders. “This is what goes on in a factory,” Lumbert says on a recent afternoon, leafing through his collection. “You can’t mold this into a sweet little office complex.”

Technology took that factory tradition and warped it in ways that neither the company nor the workers anticipated. Like countless other companies, Dow embraced the Internet in the mid-1990s, installing PCs in corporate offices and plants. Most hourly workers weren’t given true Internet access--they couldn’t get to Web pages, for instance. But they were given e-mail accounts so that they could receive schedules, sign up for courses and get company announcements.

It didn’t take long for workers to find other purposes for the network. E-mail sent the dirty jokes and pictures whipping through the plant in unprecedented volume. Workers would come back from a long weekend and find 60 or 70 messages piled up.

Most were juvenile. But with Dow connected to the electronic global village, hard-core stuff started to trickle in: pictures of humans eating feces, having sex with animals or being decapitated. They were pictures many workers couldn’t believe existed. And in that “Can you believe this?” vein, some would click on the forward button.

Angie Hacker, one of the few women fired, was responsible for sending a particularly gruesome e-mail that depicted a man cutting his finger off with a paint scraper. From others at the plant, including salaried supervisors, she was constantly getting off-color cartoons, which she kept, and pictures of naked women, which she trashed. “It didn’t bother me at all,” says Hacker, 37, whose father and grandfather each worked at Dow more than 40 years. “It’s a human nature thing. We’re not perverts. We’re all pretty normal.”

*

THE SAME TECHNOLOGY THAT MADE IT POSSIBLE TO SEND SO much material would soon make it difficult for the company to ignore it. To many Dow workers, e-mail seemed like the perfect conduit for their crude content. Compared to telling jokes by the water cooler or tacking pictures to a bulletin board, e-mail seemed private.

But in reality, e-mail is the opposite, accessible to any employer inclined to take a peek. For many employers, the ability to conduct such snooping is temptation enough. But there are also mounting legal incentives. Two Supreme Court decisions in recent years made it clear that responding aggressively to harassment complaints is the only way for a company to protect itself from costly liability claims. In this new climate, e-mail both helps employers and heightens their vulnerability. Its irrefutability allows companies to reach a verdict in disputes that once turned on conflicting accounts. E-mail records are also the first thing plaintiffs’ attorneys subpoena when building a case.

“In the past, companies confronting harassment claims could say they didn’t know who to believe,” says Matthew Schiff, a Chicago attorney and editor of a book on harassment claims published by the American Bar Assn. “Now they know. E-mail speaks for itself, it makes great evidence, and can be blown up into big exhibits at trial.”

The catalyst for the crackdown at Dow is still disputed. Union officials said they were initially told that Dow stumbled into the problem while grappling with the “I Love You” computer virus that struck around the world last May. But Dow says the investigation began May 9, when an unidentified employee complained of seeing something offensive on a plant computer.

The investigation started small. Dow asked Kent Holsing, vice president of the local union, to observe. He spent a full day looking over the shoulders of two computer workers as they followed a trail of illicit e-mail from one employee to another. “But something happened later that day,” Holsing says. “The next morning I got there, and they said, ‘This just got bigger.’ We were no longer allowed to participate.”

The investigation was mushrooming. Every e-mail trail was branching off into additional trails. Investigators realized that following them could take forever. So Dow did something extraordinary. It decided to construct a “snapshot” of its entire network on May 9, the date of the complaint. Instead of following trails, the company would scan the whole network. Suddenly, all 7,500 employees in Midland were subject to the sweep, from temporary workers right up to the CEO.

Word of the investigation began to leak around the plant, and workers scrambled to clean out e-mail files. But it was too late. The snapshot had been taken. The company zeroed in on 600 workers with e-mail in their files it deemed “inappropriate.” But that led to the most complicated problem of all: sorting these 600 workers into punishment categories.

Dow proceeded cautiously, even consulting experts on ethics. But, ultimately, it had to make subjective decisions. After two months, Dow created a punishment grid with two axes: one for the nature of the material, another for what employees had done with it.

Material was divided into three categories. Swimsuit pictures or nudes were generally placed in the first two. The third category was reserved for pictures or videos of “overt sexual acts or deviant behavior.” Dow says it did not punish anyone for merely receiving offensive e-mail. “We weren’t looking for innocent bystanders,” says Lawrence Washington, vice president of human resources. Instead, the company focused on employees who had brought material into the plant, or passed it along to others.

The harshest punishment, termination, was reserved for those who occupied the extremes of Dow’s punishment grid. They had disseminated e-mail in Category 3. Inevitably, the delineations of Dow’s grid looked cleaner on paper than in reality.

Brian Roper, 34, insists that he never sent an e-mail, that he didn’t even know how. The claim is plausible because workers weren’t trained on the e-mail system, and most hourly workers, including Roper, didn’t have PCs at home. But the company found in his “sent” box a copy of the e-mail depicting the woman and the horse. Roper said he remembers the e-mail, and remembers deleting it, but didn’t know there was such a thing as a box for sent e-mail. It was there, he says, because a colleague saw him open it, then asked permission to send it to himself. Roper says he stepped away from the keyboard and said, “Go ahead.”

Roper’s situation was gray enough that he was one of 42 union workers offered so-called “last chance” agreements, meaning they could keep their jobs if they admitted guilt, forfeited union protections and agreed to a year of probation. Roper refused, unwilling to admit any guilt. For a married father of three, it has been a costly stand. He now drives 140 miles a day to operate a jackhammer at a construction job likely to end this winter. It pays less than half of what he made at Dow. “I still think sometimes, ‘Should I have signed that last-chance agreement?’ ” says Roper, who works tirelessly to make ends meet now and who, in a cruel accident of timing, received a letter of appreciation from his supervisors the day he was fired. “Maybe I’m [stubborn] because I’m uneducated,” he says. “But I believe I’m morally right.”

*

IT’S NOVEMBER, AND FIVE FORMER Dow colleagues are gathering at the home of Phil Capp, 52, a pipe fitter at the company for 23 years. It’s the first time they have gotten together since losing their jobs. They share more bitterness than remorse, and wonder whether there were hidden motives to their firings. Maybe Dow was weeding out older workers atop the salary scale, or trying to weaken the union, which is negotiating a new contract.

All say they know colleagues and supervisors who exchanged the same e-mail, in the same volume, but who somehow kept their jobs. Some bemoan the lottery-like chance of it all. If the snapshot had been taken on a date other than May 9, maybe their in-boxes would have been clear.

Perhaps to ease their consciences, all claim to be happier away from Dow. Capp and two others, Mario Garcia and Ed Putt, were pipe fitters or millwrights, skilled trades that have given them steady contract work through the local union. They say their new crews are friendlier, their new bosses more supportive. Dow supplied a steady diet of doughnuts, grouses Putt, 54. “Where I’m at now, they have fruit every day.”

As the evening wears on, they also begin to talk about their most painful moments. For most, the worst came first: telling their families. Hacker says the only time she cried was when she told her husband and he refused to believe it, thinking it was a joke. Garcia’s tears came in the parking lot outside Dow, where his wife, Kim, was waiting in the car.

For Capp, the hardest was telling his father, who had worked for Dow for 34 years. “I remember being so ashamed of telling that man,” Capp says, tears welling at the thought of the conversation. “It made me want to puke. I’d have felt better wrecking his car.” When Capp did break the news, his father looked at him and stared, as if he couldn’t believe it. Months later, his father still clings to hope that his son will be rehired. “My father keeps asking me, ‘Have you heard anything from Dow?’ ”

The firings were big news in Midland, and almost everyone seemed to side with the company. “These people used damn poor judgment,” Don Zinser, a 57-year-old cabinetmaker, says over drinks at a local bar.

Midland Mayor R. Drummond Black says he feels “great sympathy for someone who loses the best job they’re ever going to have, because it impacts other people. But in Midland, there was also understanding and respect for the company’s decision to make a significant, value-based stand.”

But management experts say there are questions about Dow’s conduct, starting with this: If the objective was to eliminate offensive e-mail, why didn’t the company issue a warning? “If there were infractions, there should have been a warning system,” says Brandt, Dow’s historian. “That’s always been the rule. I can’t remember any case where the first offense meant discharge.”

More than a dozen workers interviewed for this story said a warning would have stopped the e-mail in an instant. Dow executives say they considered a warning. “But we thought people had adequate warning and our policies were clear enough,” says human resources’ Washington. The issue became, he says, “Are we going to stand up for our Respect and Responsibility policies?”

Respect and Responsibility is a 30-page booklet that was mailed to employees two months before the investigation. The booklet outlines the company’s harassment policies, and on Page 5, lists behavior Dow “will not tolerate.” The fifth item is “utilizing e-mail . . . to view or pass along inappropriate material (particularly relative to race, ethnicity, gender, disability, religion, or of a sexual nature).”

Many workers say they never saw the booklet. Others think they may have tossed it out without reading it. Some labor experts believe Dow could have done more before punishing workers for behavior the company appears to have overlooked for years. “It would be hard to imagine a more unfair way to implement cultural change,” says Lewis Maltby, president of the National Work Rights Institute. “Changing corporate culture is a multiyear process. You don’t issue new rules today and start firing people tomorrow.”

Another question is less academic. There are 7,500 Dow employees in Midland. Only 1,500 of them are members of the union. So why do union members represent such a disproportionate share of those fired? Asked how he explains this, Washington says, “I don’t. It’s just the facts as they came out this time.”

The union is trying to confirm that. In the first labor dispute of its kind, the union is pursuing separate cases on behalf of all 32 members who were fired, and many of those who were disciplined in other ways. Looking for inconsistencies, the union has asked Dow for documents on its handling of nonunion workers, and the “summary sheets” used to determine where workers were placed on its punishment grid.

Dow did not comply, even after the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint in November charging that failure to do so violated labor law. That issue is scheduled to go before an administrative law judge Monday. “Many members and employees and people in the community question whether there’s an ulterior motive to what Dow has done,” Holsing says. “That’s difficult for me to say. But we do believe that the punishment did not fit the crime.”

Even if the union can win the jobs back, the fight could drag on for as long as two years. For Bob Richmond, that’s a long time. Richmond, 53, had been at Dow since 1973. His knees and wrists have been arthritic ever since he landed on them after falling out of a forklift. The tips of three fingers have been missing since 1985, when he poked his hand into a valve at work trying to clear it. In July, when plant security took his badge and escorted him off the plant, he had one thought: “What the hell just happened? Didn’t the last 20 years matter?” The timing was awful. Richmond had just remodeled his house with features to make it easier for his wife, who has muscular dystrophy, to get around. The payments were easy when he was making $22.33 an hour, but have been impossible since. Richmond and many of his fired colleagues spent months trying to find work. They have applied for jobs at supermarkets, construction companies, Dow Corning--which is also based in Midland--and even Wal-Mart.

But they have been tripped up by the inevitable line on applications that asks why they left their previous job. Richmond, like others, is honest, saying he was fired for “Internet violations.” In this faltering economy, few companies are willing to hire workers bearing the stigma. Richmond filed for bankruptcy in October. He still has his home. But his Pontiac has been repossessed and his Dodge truck soon will be. “I’ve never been so embarrassed,” he says. “You work all your life and you don’t expect to end up here.”

Inside the plant, union officials and some workers say, Dow’s once familial atmosphere has been poisoned. Some employees will no longer touch computers. But Dow executives say the vast majority of responses from within the plant have been positive, that workers are proud of the company for taking a moral stand. Washington, Dow’s head of human resources, says he has received numerous thank-you notes.

If that is the case, more notes of appreciation may be on the way. After the Midland crackdown, Dow launched an identical investigation at its plant in Freeport, Texas, where 22 workers were fired (18 of them union members) and 240 others have been disciplined. Again, Dow says the action was prompted by a single complaint.

Recently, the company ordered its 41,000 workers worldwide to take an online course covering material in the Respect and Responsibility booklet. Afterward, they were required to take a computerized multiple-choice test whose answers seem more obvious now than they were seven months ago.

Question No. 3, for example, reads: “You will lose your job if you intentionally access, download, save or send sexually explicit or pornographic jokes or material.”

True or false?