| Legal experts differ on the importance of the Eveleth
Mines case. When it was decided, some lawyers thought it would lead
to a flood of similar lawsuits – big, class-action cases in which
all the women in a company sued as a group.
The predicted flood has not materialized, but the case was followed
by other class action sexual harassment cases that resulted in large
damage awards. Mitsubishi settled a case for $34 million after women
alleged they’d been groped and faced lewd comments and obscene
graffiti at an Illinois auto plant. Dial Soap settled a similar case
for $10 million.
In recent years there’ve been class action harassment suits against
Merrill Lynch, the federal mint in Denver, mental hospitals in Nebraska,
and the dockworkers union in Florida. Teen workers filed a class action
harassment suit against fast food restaurants in Arizona and New Mexico.
Law professor Melissa Hart says the EEOC has made a conscious
decision to pursue discrimination and harassment cases as class actions,
but she says the courts aren’t seeing a deluge of class action
harassment cases. Hart believes that’s partly because the kind
of company-wide harassment that happened at Eveleth Mines is less common
these days. So it usually doesn’t work to sue as a group.
“I think there’s been a sort of a settling down to a place
where most of the time, most employees live
without sexual harassment,” Hart says. “At the same time,
it’s still out there, and still out there so much more regularly
than you wish it would be. But I definitely think things are wildly
better than they were 30 years ago in 1975 when Lois Jenson started
working at Eveleth Mines.”
Today, the mine in Eveleth has the anti-harassment policy the women
fought for. Denise Vesel says if someone harassed her today, she could
report it, and management would make it stop. The mine has new owners
now. Vesel says the graffiti is painted over, and she hasn’t felt
she had to slug any of the men recently.
“The guys themselves have all more or less cooled their jets,”
she says. “They don’t harass anymore. There’s a few
with big mouths, but … it isn’t like it used to be in the
70s and 80s. It was terrible back then. I mean, all the ones that were
causing trouble are either dead, retired, or quit. So we don’t
have that breed out there anymore.”
Vesel says workers at the mine, men and women, feel like
they have to stick together these days, because there are so few of
them left. Changes in the steel industry have led to steep drops in
employment. The workforce in the mines is less than a third of what
it was in 1979, down from more than 13,000 people to fewer than
4,000. There are fewer workers, and fewer of them are women; women
got laid off first because they had the least seniority. But women are
still there.
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