Category: Sexual Harassment

Canada Union Responds to Murder

The Canadian labor movement is ahead of the US in recognition of the issue of workplace violence, because of the Dec 6, 1989 Montreal Massacre of 14 women who were murdered that day at Ecole Polytechnique by a man who didn’t think women should be engineering students. There was a struggle then to get the Canadian Labour Council to recognize the issue, but the victory has carried forward. 

IBEW Canada Statement Mourning the Loss of Amber Czech and Condemning Violence in the Workplace

Toronto, ON – November 17, 2025

Today, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Canada International Vice President Russ Shewchuk issued the following statement:

“IBEW Canada mourns the loss of 20-year-old welder Amber Czech, who was brutally attacked and killed at her workplace in Minnesota. We extend our deepest condolences to Amber’s family, friends, fellow workers and her community.

“Although Amber was not a member of the IBEW or affiliated Building Trades Unions (NABTU/CBTU), what happened to her should never happen to anyone—anywhere. And while this tragedy occurred in the U.S., the loss is deeply felt across our union community in Canada. It’s a stark reminder of the work we must keep doing to ensure such senseless acts never happen again.

“Violence has no place on our job sites, in our offices, or in our union. We owe it to Amber, and to every worker who has been harmed or threatened, to build safe, respectful, and inclusive working environments, free of violence and cruelty.

“IBEW Canada stands with all who advocate for ending gender-based violence, and all violence in the workplace. We commit to ongoing training, conversation and action that promote equity and dignity for all workers.”

###

Media Contact: Shaina Hardie, shaina_hardie@ibew.org

The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) represents approximately 70,000 members in Canada and 873,000 members and retirees in North America who work in a wide variety of fields, including construction, utilities, manufacturing, telecommunications, broadcasting, railroads and government. For more information, visit IBEWcanada.ca or IBEW.org

It’s time for our US labor unions to condemn workplace violence and do something about it.

Tradeswoman Killer Indicted

Indictment means possible life term for man accused of killing co-worker in Wright County workshop

One major labor organization noted that “violence like this rarely comes out of nowhere. It often follows a buildup that women in the trades know by heart.” 

By Paul Walsh

The Minnesota Star Tribune

DECEMBER 8, 2025 AT 10:41AM

Amber Czech

The man accused of killing a co-worker last month with a hammer in a Wright County workshop now faces a charge of first-degree murder and a potential life prison sentence in a slaying that drew outcry by advocacy groups for women in the trades.

A grand jury heard the case last week against David Bruce DeLong, 40, of Watkins, Minn., and indicted him on a charge of first-degree premeditated murder in connection with the attack in Cokato that killed 20-year-old Amber Mary Czech of Hutchinson, Minn.

The bludgeoning occurred on Nov. 11 at Advanced Process Technologies, which makes equipment used in food processing.

County Attorney Brian Lutes said the first-degree count carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole. DeLong also faces a second-degree murder charge.

DeLong remains jailed in lieu of $2 million bail ahead of a court appearance Monday. The Minnesota Star Tribune has reached out to his attorney for a response to the allegations.

An online fundraising campaign started to cover funeral expenses noted that “Amber was a hardworking welder who took great pride in her craft and dreamed of building a bright future through her work. Her witty personality, positive attitude, and beautiful smile touched everyone who knew her.”

Numerous labor organizations decried the workplace killing of Czech, including the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers (SMART), with 230,000 members in North America.

“While not a SMART member … this tragedy is reverberating across the trades community and far beyond,” read a statement from the organization. “So many tradeswomen and gender-diverse workers are carrying the weight of this news.”

SMART went on to point out that “violence like this rarely comes out of nowhere. It often follows a buildup that women in the trades know by heart: harassment shrugged off, bullying tolerated, intimidation minimized, warning signs dismissed, fear of backlash, comments ignored, jokes explained away, the stares of resentment, and behaviors everyone chooses not to see until they can no longer look away.”

The Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA), which counts 500,000 workers across many industries among its ranks, said in a statement, “When a young tradeswoman’s future is so violently crushed, we must look to the criminal justice system to do its job — but as brothers and sisters in the construction trades we must also do much, much more. … We must not only condemn the violence that took Czech’s life but also the attitudes and behavior that normalize an atmosphere of fear for too many construction craftswomen.”

According to the complaint:

David Bruce DeLong (Wright County jail)

Around 6 a.m., a caller to 911 said Czech was bleeding heavily from a blow to the head, and there was a bloody sledgehammer on the floor nearby. Emergency medical responders arrived and declared her dead at the scene.

A sheriff’s deputy identified DeLong as the suspected attacker. DeLong said to a man at the business “something to the effect of, ‘I hit her with your hammer. She is by your toolbox. She is gone,’” the complaint read.

Sheriff’s deputies reviewed surveillance video inside the business and saw DeLong walk from his workstation to Czech’s, grab a sledgehammer and swing it. The victim was out of view of the camera.

DeLong’s swings indicated that he targeted her once while she was standing and four more times after she fell to the floor.

After his arrest, DeLong confessed to killing Czech. He said he didn’t like her and had been “planning to kill [her] for some time,” the complaint continued.

She was Bludgeoned to Death with a Sledge Hammer on the Job

Say Her Name: Amber Czech

https://19thnews.org/2025/11/amber-czech-welder-murder-tradeswomen-demand-action/

Tradeswomen Organize for Job Safety

She was not the first. I wrote about the murder of another tradeswoman in 2017: https://mollymartin.blog/2024/06/27/a-sisters-murder-sparks-action/

Sign Making Party Santa Rosa

Neighbors Getting Ready for the Big Demonstration Saturday

Why would you want to be a woman?

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Why would you want to be a woman? We are discriminated against. The men we work with hate us. We get paid less. Why choose that?”

Jesus thought for a moment. “When I get in the shower and look down at my penis, I hate it. I feel like it shouldn’t be there.”

We were standing out in the corporation yard, away from our coworkers in the shops. 

Jesus and I had worked together at the San Francisco Water Department for a couple of years and I was glad we’d become close enough for me to ask such a personal question. I was starting to get it.

But I was skeptical. “Jesus, you grew up with male privilege. How do you know what it will be like?”

“I know because I’ve already lived as a woman,” he said. “For three years.”

Jesus is a stationary engineer. His job is to maintain the pump stations for the San Francisco Water Department. I’m the electrician whose job is to maintain the electrical components of the system. We work out of a corporation yard in the industrial southeast part of the city. Each of us works alone but we often encounter each other out in the field at the pump stations. In a world of macho plumbers and engineers we gravitate to each other, more because we are different than because we are the same. We are both outcasts and we both must live within the dominant paradigm: a sexist and racist work culture with coworkers who believe we don’t belong there. It’s their territory.

It’s 1983. I’m a temporary worker with no benefits. I could be fired at any time with no recourse.  I feel like I have to prove myself every day. I’m not out of the closet at work and I worry that this information might lead to a layoff.

The men think they can talk to me about Jesus. I wonder if they talk to him about me, but I think he is even more of an outsider than I am, transgender and Mexican. I’m a white lesbian and usually the only female. When you’re a double or triple minority you can never be sure why you are targeted for harassment. 

“Is he gay?” They ask me. And I must try to explain transgender to these dickheads.

I know Jesus endures discrimination and harassment. The men he works with simply refuse to talk to him. They pretend he’s not there. I know from experience that this form of harassment takes a toll. It’s a way to get you to leave and it often works. 

Despite all this Jesus appears to be the happiest person in the yard. He’s always singing or humming to himself and he has cemented a stereotype in my mind of Mexicans as people who smile through adversity. Yeah, I know that’s politically incorrect. I know that not all Mexicans are happy. Still, my brain forms stereotypes without my permission and I figure it’s best to acknowledge it, at least to myself. Jesus sets a good example for me. I tend to react to sexism and homophobia with anger. I can’t express it and so I walk around with the anger inside. And I take it home with me.

One day I’m assigned to work at the Lake Merced pump station in the southwest part of the city. That’s where the huge water supply pipes come in from the city’s Hetch Hetchy reservoir in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The pump motors here are 100 HP and they run on 4600 volts. (The highest voltage supplied to our homes is 220 volts.) The switchgear supplying the motors hums in a giant metal cabinet.

I’m the only electrician and it’s my job to maintain this equipment. But I’ve never been trained on high voltage. The union didn’t let women into its apprenticeship program and so I’ve learned the basics in a federal job training program and from experience. I easily passed the civil service test for electrician but I’ve never worked on more than 480 volt systems.

When the chief engineer orders me to diagnose a problem in the switchgear, I do my best to appear competent. In troubleshooting, the first step is to test. I pull out my trusty tester, a little black box with two wire leads and touch the leads to the live switchgear.

Electricians reading this will know what happens next–my tester is only rated for 1000 volts.

With an ear splitting bang the tester blows up and I’m thrown backward, landing on my butt on the concrete floor.

Jesus, the engineer on duty, rushes over, looking alarmed. “Are you ok?” He asks. 

“I’m ok I’m ok,” I say. It’s the first thing we always say after a disaster, even if not true. The loud blast affected my hearing. It sounds like we’re under water. 

I could have been killed. I could have been killed. Joe, the chief engineer, knows this. He has seen the explosion and he makes a quick exit, better to not be part of this. 

The first emotion I register is embarrassment. I should have used the pole tester, rated for this purpose, but it’s a tool I’d never used before. I know I represent my gender to these men and my worth and work will determine their stereotypical view of women in their workplace. Their ideas of working with women will be based on me, until other females come along. My huge blunder will make all women look bad.

I’m embarrassed and I’m shaken, one minute regretting my mistake and the next thinking I could be dead. I could be dead. Stupid stupid stupid.

Jesus leads me into the chief engineer’s office where I try to recover, crouching in a corner on the floor, hugging my knees to alleviate the shaking. I could be dead. I could be dead.Jesus stays with me for moral support. And that’s when he tells me his story.

He grew up in Mexico City where he learned the trade of stationary engineer, maintaining the systems in big buildings. Then he migrated to San Francisco, became a U.S. citizen and got a job working as an engineer for another city department. That’s when he first decided to transition from male to female. He was living as a female, taking hormones and contemplating surgery when he was in a serious car accident. After time in the hospital he decided to go back to being male. That was several years earlier. In his present job he has always been male, but word got around and his coworkers know he once presented as female. 

But he’s not happy as male. This is not who he really is. He’s thinking again about transitioning. He’s saving money for the operation and figures it will cost about $10,000.

“I want to tell you something I’ve never told anyone at work,” I say. “I’m gay.” And with that a sense of relief fills me. I’m no longer alone here.

Jesus nods. “I thought so,” he says, “but thanks for telling me.”

This admission makes me feel I can ask him anything without offending him.

“So are you attracted to men or women? If you transition will you be a lesbian?”

“I’m attracted to women,” he says. “Gender is different from sexual attraction.”

“I know,” I say. “I don’t want to be a man, but I sure would like some of that male privilege.”

Jesus tells me he has gone to meetings of trans groups in the city, but he never feels like he belongs anywhere. He has no community.

To me this is tragic. I depend on my lesbian and tradeswomen communities to survive as an outsider.

“What was it like for you being a woman in the trades?” I ask. 

“They assume a man knows everything,” he says. “That’s challenging, because of course we don’t. But we have to act like we do. It can lead to unsafe behavior. We’re all supposed to be cowboys. 

“They assume a woman knows nothing. That has its own drawbacks. They refuse to pass on knowledge. They take your tools away and don’t want to let you do anything.”

The last thing I want to be is a woman who knows nothing. Nor do I want to out macho the boys, to act like I know something when I don’t. Doing that has nearly killed me.

Jesus would never say it. He’s too polite and gentlemanly. But I understand his point–stop acting like a dick.

Ch. 2: https://mollymartin.blog/2021/04/05/call-her-by-her-name/

A Woman’s Work

The Fight Fight Fight for Decent Treatment by NFL Cheerleaders

I admit I was prejudiced. I was one of those feminists who thought cheerleaders were the antithesis of feminism, sucking up to powerful men and athletes, embodying or seeking to embody the male ideal of woman.

But then I saw the PBS film A Woman’s Work, about the struggle of the NFL cheerleaders for better wages and working conditions. Now I think some cheerleaders are feminist heroes. 

The film documents their years-long campaign against wage theft by their employer, the National Football League. The NFL and its 32 franchises are worth $80 billion and yet, rather than do the right thing and pay their workers a decent wage, they round up their corporate lawyers and fight to keep women down. The industry, run by rich conservative old men, still views itself as untouchable. Now the cheerleaders are on the front line in the feminist struggle against male chauvinism, male privilege and toxic masculinity.

I’m a retired electrician who has fought for the last half-century to insure women’s entry to the skilled trades. The construction industry is the other side of the gendered employment coin. We were kept out of lucrative union construction jobs because of our gender. The bosses said we were not strong enough to do the work and they’re still saying it, even though we’ve been doing the work for decades. Of course just because the job is physically difficult does not mean a worker makes better pay. Quite the contrary. Plenty of women (and men) work at hard jobs for low pay. Union construction workers make good money because of union contracts.

Women wanted to work in construction for many reasons: We wanted to build something valuable, to learn a craft and take pride in it. Many of us chafed at being required to wear dresses, pantyhose and makeup to work. But the big reason was money. Men working in “men’s” jobs make way more money than women working in “women’s” jobs.

Watching this film I felt an immediate sisterhood with the cheerleaders. Their plight brought up questions for me: What do they, working in a “woman’s job” have in common with us women who work in the construction trades? The film asks “What is women’s work? What is men’s work?” Cheerleading was once the domain of men, that is until team owners realized sexy women shaking their booties could make money for them. 

I didn’t know how bad it has been for cheerleaders. Maybe no one did. They were traditionally paid less than minimum wage and not paid for much of the work they did. Some teams paid them nothing at all. They were required to practice—wage free—for nine months before the season. And they were fined when late to practice. They were constantly scrutinized for body fat and rated on the size of body parts.

The film introduces us to three women from different NFL teams who chose to fight the NFL’s sexism. Lacy’s story is compelling. The product of a poor family in small town Alabama, she had always wanted to be a dancer and she began winning dance contests early on. The first to file a lawsuit, in 2014, she worked for the Oakland Raiders. A cheerleader in high school and college, Lacy was used to being paid for her work. “Louisiana Tech compensated us well,” she says. So it was a shock to find out the Raiders and the NFL didn’t value the cheerleaders even enough to pay minimum wage. The women didn’t get paid till the end of the year, and then not at all for the nine months of required practice sessions. Hair, nails, tan and required travel were out-of-pocket expenses. Waiting for her first paycheck to come, Lacy says she didn’t know all this.

Lacy retained the San Francisco law firm Levy Vinick Burrell Hyams, known for taking on major employment discrimination cases. I was pleased that the film includes interviews with the lawyers, all women. The firm’s symbol is Rosie the Riveter and their motto is “Who would Rosie hire?” Prominent in the office, besides numerous images of Rosie, is a picture of attorney Leslie Levy with Mary Dunlap, a civil rights hero in the San Francisco Bay Area. A well-known feminist and gay activist who died in 2003 at 54, Mary was a founder of Equal Rights Advocates, a law firm that we tradeswomen have worked with since the 1970s. Without our dedicated lawyers we could never have succeeded in integrating the construction trades. As with the cheerleaders, class action lawsuits were the basis of our ongoing struggle.

Also profiled is Maria who, along with five other cheerleaders, filed suit against the Buffalo Bills, a team that expected its cheerleading squad, the Buffalo Jills, to work for free. In response the NFL used tactics that employers typically use to fight unions. The Buffalo Bills team simply abolished its cheer squad. Then they blamed the women who filed the suit, using the divide and conquer tactic and bullying the others to opt out of the suit, which has still not been resolved.

Bailey Davis is the third cheerleader profiled in the film. She filed an EEOC complaint against the New Orleans Saints. Davis was one of the Saintsations, the Saints’ cheerleading squad. That is, until she posted a photo of herself in a one-piece lace bodysuit on her private Instagram account. The Saints fired the 22-year-old in 2018 for violating a code of conduct that prohibits cheerleaders from appearing nude, seminude or in lingerie. It wasn’t the only strict rule that Davis and her former colleagues had to follow—cheerleaders for the Saints can’t have players follow them on social media, must have private social media accounts and are required to leave parties or restaurants if players are there. The company says the rules are in place to prevent cheerleaders from being preyed on by players.

“The players have the freedom to post whatever they want to on social media,” Davis told the press. “They can promote themselves, but we can’t post anything on our social media about being a Saintsation. We can’t have it in our profile picture, we can’t use our last name for media, we can’t promote ourselves, but the players don’t have the same restrictions.”

The women who filed suit against the NFL were attacked mercilessly. “I just kept telling myself I’m doing the right thing,” says Lacy.

At the same time as it keeps a tight reign on the cheerleaders’ behavior, the NFL protects players charged with domestic violence. There’s a connection here. “Wage theft, sexual harassment and domestic violence are all about power,” say the lawyers. 

Scenes later in the film show these women at home taking care of kids and husbands with a not-so-subtle message that all women’s work is undervalued. Here these women work for free and there is no time off.

Another issue, the sexual harassment and pimping of cheerleaders is only hinted at in the film, which focuses on labor issues like wages and working conditions. In 2018 Washington Redskins cheerleaders complained of being pimped out to male donors. “I don’t think they viewed us as people,” said one. 

Football reeks of toxic masculinity. And having a posse of sexy females ready to do your bidding and totally under your control is just part of the deal. Women are seen by these men as sexual objects. Decades ago the Dallas Cowboys led the way in selling sex on the sidelines while paying the cheerleaders next to nothing. “It was a business,” said members of the squad. “And we were the merchandise.” 

In the construction trades, after decades of fighting for equal treatment, our efforts are paying off. It took years to get our unions on board, but now they are partnering with women to improve working conditions. Because of our advances, when the #Metoo movement erupted I was shocked—not that sexual harassment existed in Hollywood and elsewhere, but that it was so widespread and institutionalized. The world of construction is changing, if slowly, and we are ahead of some industries.

The world of cheerleading is changing too. It’s now seen as a competitive sport that incorporates gymnastics with athletic dance. Millions of people watch and participate in worldwide competitions. The NFL needs to get with the program.

Lacy won her lawsuit, after four years of fighting, but many more lawsuits are in process. Ten teams have been sued so far. The NFL has met its match in cheerleaders. Lacy, who had not considered herself a feminist, now says, “I realize feminism is everything I’m fighting for—equal rights, equal pay, equal treatment.”

Published in New York Labor History http://newyorklaborhistory.org/web/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/WHN_wintersping2021_F.pdf

Call Me By My Name

Republishing another on-the-job story from Tradeswomen Magazine, our national and international means of communication in the 80s and 90s.

Porta-potty persecution

More on-the-job memories from 1980. This is a true story with names changed to make it fiction. Published in Tradeswomen Magazine, our means of communication in the 1980s and 90s.

In the Wake of the Weinstein Conviction

I’ve been going through my collection of Tradeswomen magazines (published by volunteer tradeswomen 1981-1999) and thinking about how much of what we wrote still has relevance today. We started writing and talking about sexual harassment before the term was even in the mainstream lexicon and before we had any legal backing. We were truly foremothers in this fight, and our persistence has paid off in improved industry standards and better working conditions for women in the construction trades. Here’s a story we published in 1983.

Sisters Restoring Justice

Every woman has a retribution fantasy, what she would do to her harasser or rapist. She probably won’t tell you what it is but she has one, maybe many. 

My group of tradeswomen activists not only imagined retribution, we planned and executed it. Perhaps corrective justice is a better choice of words.

We were an organized group of women who were trying our damndest to break barriers to nontraditional blue collar work. Men wanted to keep those high-paid jobs for themselves. So when one of us finally landed a job, we were subject to harassment with the aim of getting us to quit. At that time in the late seventies  sexual harassment was not yet illegal and the term was not yet in popular use. We tradeswomen used the term gender harassment.

We were working at integrating the construction trades, bus driving, firefighting, policing, printing, dock work—all the jobs women had been kept out of. One job classification we focused on was ferryboat deckhand. Women had won a discrimination lawsuit, a judge had signed a consent decree, and a handful of women had broken into the trade. As with construction, you had to jump both the barriers of bosses and the union.

One of our biggest challenges was isolation on the job. Once you got hired, you were usually the only female there. We tried to combat isolation by recruiting more women and by organizing support groups wherever we were.

Annie McCombs was our gal on the ferries, having made it through the union process. A militant lesbian feminist with a take no prisoners attitude, Annie was committed to increasing the number of women on the waterfront, to truly integrating the trade. After five years as a ferryboat deckhand she had gained a reputation as someone who did not tolerate abuse.

Fear of violence was based on reality. A common myth among fishers and sailors was that a woman on your boat was bad luck. We had met a woman who had been thrown off a boat into the water by coworkers who intended to kill her for supposedly bringing bad luck.

Annie worked occasionally with another young woman, Patricia. She was American Indian, a lesbian and only 18 with little work experience. One day Patricia approached Annie and told her about a guy on the job who harassed her mercilessly. The harassment had turned violent when they worked together on the night shift. He had locked them in to a bathroom they were assigned to clean and shoved her up against the wall. Only the night watchman knocking on the door saved her from being raped. He assaulted her again the next night but she fought back and was able to break free.

Annie helped Patricia meet with her boss and the union rep, going through all the required motions. They got nowhere. The next step would be litigation, but we activists did not recommend women file individual lawsuits. That got you blacklisted and unemployed.

We resorted to direct action. Annie called a meeting and 30 women showed up. She told us about the situation and we began to strategize. How could we get this guy to back off and stop harassing our sister? We had heard about a group of women stripping a rapist naked and tying him to a pole in the middle of town. That was a great fantasy, but none of us was willing to take the chance of being arrested for assault. Whatever we did would have to be hands off. We also wanted our action to be collective, something we could all participate in. We needed to make sure this guy knew that what he was doing was wrong and that it had to stop. It would be great if the woman he had targeted could confront him directly, if we could help her feel safe enough to do that.

Jan, a tradeswoman sister, spoke up. We needed to confront this guy on our own terms in a place of our choosing, not at work. She suggested that one of us should get him on a date. This seemed crazy to me. I was never any good at picking up men, but other women in the group assured me it wasn’t that hard. Hadn’t we been trained all our lives to do this? Jan volunteered to be the bait and we worked out an elaborate plan for her to pick him up.

We would lure him to a secluded location in Golden Gate Park, surround him and let his victim confront him. I, for one, did not see how this was possible. How would we get him to the park?

Jan planned to invite him to a party at the deYoung Museum and make some excuse to get him to the nearby rose garden. The rose garden is surrounded by tall hedges, perfect for hiding behind. And it’s relatively dark. Our action would take place at dusk.

Word of the action got around and our planning meetings expanded to 50. Everybody wanted to be involved with this action. What militant feminist wouldn’t?

We considered the possibility that the harasser might have a gun. Annie knew that some deckhands carried handguns in their seabags. Many of us practiced karate and self-defense and we engaged martial arts experts to take command in case our perp responded violently. A woman was assigned to each limb and his head in case he reached for a gun or bolted. But unless he attacked, we were not to touch him.

Women volunteered for specific tasks: lookouts, runners, watchers from park benches. We would not leave Jan alone with the man and risk his assaulting another woman.

In the meantime, Annie had drawn up a map of the park with our location and planned out the timing. We were to hide in the bushes near the trail and pop out as he and Jan came by. 

I was dubious. Could we really pull this off? There were so many variables. What if he didn’t go with Jan? What if he saw us in the bushes? What if the timing were hours off?

Fifty women had assembled some blocks away at a staging area in the Haight Ashbury when a carload of country women from Mendocino showed up. They had heard about the action through the lesbian grapevine. Now numbering more than 50, we all made our way to the rose garden.

We hid behind hedges and trees, waiting silently for maybe 20 minutes. Everybody knew the plan. I couldn’t believe it when I saw Jan and the guy walking down the trail. Jan really did it! Our butch dyke sister had transformed into a fetching het woman. She wore a pink sweater wrapped casually around her shoulders.

Just as they crossed in front of us the spotter blew a whistle, the designated woman stepped out into the trail, and then all the women materialized and circled the guy. Jan melted into the crowd.

My only job was to stand in place with a mean look on my face. I can tell you this is not so easy when one feels exhilaration.

Our chosen spokeswoman stepped forward menacingly. She addressed the harasser. “Don’t talk, just nod if you understand.” 

A woman was assigned to remind him to nod. He did not need to be reminded.

“We know you have been harassing women on your job. We know where you live. We know the car you drive. If you continue to harass women we will come and get you,” she said.

I could see his knees shaking. It looked to me like he had peed his pants.

Patricia stepped forward but she was not able to speak. Her partner spoke for her, naming the harassment.

Finally the crowd of angry women parted and let the man out. He was ordered to return to his car and not to look back.

Our action had succeeded. We were jubilant. A cheer went up from the 50 women. Then we quickly decamped to an agreed-upon location for a post-mortem and to celebrate. 

As for the harasser, he was not seen around the waterfront for several months. Later, when he took a part-time job with the company, he made sure to keep his head down when passing Annie or Patricia. Soon after that he disappeared altogether.