Category: Sexual Harassment

Race and Gender

Telegraph Hill – 1974

By Eric Johnson

I worked for Plant Bros. of San Francisco in the early Seventies.  After a probation period, they sent me to a jobsite that had just begun, in the shadow of Telegraph Hill, right by the waterfront. They had to completely overhaul an old grain warehouse and convert it into an upscale office building.  The location was great – you could walk at lunch-break over to the wharves, or just sit in a vacant lot and look at the Bay. And the building was interesting, especially as we began to mine our way into it.  It was a remnant of the industrial past of San Francisco’s waterfront, a brick five-story warehouse with rugged interiors.  We had to earthquake-proof it, tear up flooring, destroy the old freight elevator shaft, and then frame up the new sets of offices.  The flooring had been laid when mahogany was cheap, so we were cutting through two tongue-and-groove, inch-thick mahogany floor layers.  We burned out blade after blade of our skilsaws and spent weeks with crowbars ripping out and dumpstering the wood. Then re-flooring it with heavy plywood.

 This first month was not really carpentry, but I liked it. For one thing, I had an apprentice assigned to me – which was my first time having that responsibility. He was a young Chinese guy who I liked immediately. Eugene knew he was a token of integration for the union – there were less than ten Asian carpenters, and the local was under pressure from all minorities to open up. Eugene and I were attuned in the political culture of San Francisco in the early Seventies and we also both knew how to work with alacrity.  Things got even more interesting when they hired a Mexican-American woman named Inez Garcia. She was only the second woman in the union’s history.  I had worked with the other, at the General Hospital job. They had assigned her to simply push in all the snap-ties on all the forms, thus earning her the name “snap-tie Mary”. There was a quarrel in the union to get her boss to actually let her learn the trade.

 Now Inez was in that position, but it was more promising.  The foreman was civil to her and we formed-up a little team, with Eugene and I and Inez and an older Italian guy named Ron.  I was given the lead responsibility of cutting a big trapezoidal hole through all five floors for the new open stairway in the center of the building.   The foreman and I studied the blueprint, devising a way to place that trapezoid correctly in reference to the walls – then I explained it all and assigned us to different duties. It went ahead really well at first.  The challenge of the cutting was apparent and the two young recruits felt that I was teaching them things.  We had lively lunch breaks, and I started looking forward to coming in to work.

After the layout was agreed on, we built walls along those lines from the floor to ceiling, tightly wedged so that the weight of the floor above would be supported when we cut the shape out of it. We finished it late one day, and the next morning we were going to start the cut on the second floor. I woke up early with a clutch of anxiety. Something was wrong, I was sure of it.  I got to work early and studied the blueprint, stared at the lines, the walls…and suddenly knew what it was.  We had built one of the walls on the wrong side of our chalk line; it would be the width of the two-by-six too small! Oh shit, this will look bad. Good that I’d caught it before we cut through above, but… here we had this big twelve-foot-high wall we had to tear down. Luck was with me, as the foreman had to be at another job for the first hour. I told the others what we’d done, and they gravely considered it. I told them we had a slim chance to avoid detection if we all four went at this furiously; removing nails, sledge-hammering the walls over, adding some pieces to fill in, plumbing-and-lining it again…and re-nailing. So that’s what we did, everyone working twice as fast as usual… and just had the wall in place and nailed when the foreman came in. I was already upstairs laying out the cuts. He waved happily and we were home free.

Credit: Western Neighborhoods Project

Those cuts were not simple either.  Once we had lines snapped and were dead certain of them, we had to Skil saw through the double layers of mahogany. Then we confronted the huge joists, rough 4 x 12 timbers, some of them doubled-up.  The foreman got us a chainsaw, and after carefully extending the lines down over the angles of the joists, I started lopping them off, confident from my memory of doing the same thing on the roof at the Unitarian Church.  This all went very well, and we progressed upward the remaining four landings, making the same cut each time.  Inez and I became good friends, Eugene was becoming the job wit, and I was beginning to enjoy my own leadership. It was interesting to see the way what they wanted to have happen socially was allowing me to be more who I was. Not a leader with commanding certainty, but someone who would let others see my process, my confusions.  I could ask for help, and even make things fun.

The new elevator was going to be hydraulic, and it needed a hole as deep as the building was tall – for the piston to recede down into it when the elevator was on the ground floor. So there was a big drilling rig at the building’s edge, boring a four-foot-wide hole…sixty feet deep.  At thirty feet they hit some rubble. Pieces of the old waterfront fill.  Then there was stone.  The auger couldn’t penetrate it and they brought in a specialist.

 Mario was a Latino guy who was like a deep-sea diver. He was to be lowered down the hole with a jackhammer so he could break up the layer of stone. We saw him getting ready early the first morning and Inez asked him what the hell he was going to do?  It looked strange, the special winch they had for lowering him down, the cradle of canvas straps, the jackhammer hose, his oxygen mask.  He explained the whole thing as if it were routine, then says he never feels claustrophobic because he smokes a joint first. I had trouble understanding that part.  If I smoked a joint first, the last place in creation I’d want to be, would be thirty feet down a shaft too narrow to move around in. But he assured us it was the only way he could stay calm and focus on the simple task of it. I said, what if you space out and don’t realize you’re not getting enough air? He said he had a regular code of tugs on the rope and that they would frequently tug at him for response.  Jesus.  We watched him go down…and then felt the vibrations of the hammer.  He worked about a half hour and then they pulled him up, covered with dust.  He laughed at us, drank some water, and went back down again.  We talked about it all day, how…bizarre it was.  Mario was either a great hero …or a chump who would be dead tomorrow.

He didn’t die, but he did share his joint with Inez, Gene & me the next morning.  Two tokes was enough to make me want to go off wandering along the waterfront to study wave patterns and old fishermen. Gene and Inez were used to smoking more, and able to buoy me up those first few hours. The work we were doing was hilarious for a while. Gene started giggling at the stack of fresh plywood.  He said there were flies on it, it was ridiculous somehow.  I got a can of spray paint and wrote “ FLY WOOD” on it huge. We were hysterical. “Inez! Go get us a sheet of flywood!”  She exploded when she saw it. What fun!  But, but, … I was the lead man, I had to fight through this, I had to keep working and, like Mario, find somehow the even keel of bemusement yet purpose.  It wasn’t easy and I decided next day to pass on the offered joint. In fact it was fifteen years before I ever tried that again, and then almost fell off a roof. Not all of us are as talented as Mario.  At the end of the week we had decided that in truth he was a hero of the first order.  He had broken through several feet of hard rock and the auger went back at it.  Mario shook hands with a grin, and rode off into the fog.

Our foreman was transferred, and a new guy brought in. At first we liked him all right.  He seemed comfortable with the two young minority apprentices, and came over to yak with us often.  But after a week, he started being too comfortable…with Inez.  He kept her after work one day with a contrived duty, and a few days later switched her to a solo task, which broke up our team.  She was given the job of boring all the holes in the brick wall on every floor, that would allow the earthquake bolts to be set in from floor structure to exterior brick. There were hundreds of these to do, and one had to get down on knees or recline positions to hold the impact drill with any authority. It was…the worst job.  Each of us had done it for a few hours on other days, and at first we thought, well, someone has to do it, apprentices often get this kind of grunge work.  But then it went on the next day, and the next.  Inez came up to me after work and said we had to talk.  We went for coffee and she told me that Jim had propositioned her a couple of days back…and she had turned him down.  He was pissed and told her he would make life miserable for her unless she ‘dated’ him.

So that explained the sentence of hard labor.  Inez was furious, but she felt she had no grounds for saying she shouldn’t have to do the job.  Inez was really a rugged, working-class woman.  The last thing she wanted was to be perceived as whining about physical labor.  In fact, she was as strong as me, a formidable person – who also was not a bit afraid of Jim physically.  In fact, she was bigger than him. That made it even more disgusting.  He was unable to force her or convince her or attract her.   The raw power of the paycheck was what he had.  When she had complained that he was treating her unfairly with the hole-drilling, he’d simply said, “Okay; then date me or you’re fired!”

 I advised her to go to the union in the morning before work. Apprentices are supposed to be instructed, for one thing. And then of course there’s the sexual harassment, a legitimate and potentially scandalous thing for the company. I told her who to see, the most reliable of the business agents, and asked if she wanted me to come with her. She said no, she wanted to be able to carry herself as a stand-up member of the local, not dependent on anyone.

Next day she was gone.  I called her that night and she said the union rep had taken her side with integrity and had called the company.  They agreed to transfer her to another jobsite and make sure she was treated fairly if there was no threat of a lawsuit.  Inez had agreed to this, but we both felt depressed.  I felt I had to apologize for the whole backward mob of jerks that populate construction work.  It was as if she had been a lantern in a cave, revealing our stupid scuttling ways.  Ugh. She told me to drop that rhetorical bullshit, that the only thing that depressed her about it was that she would miss all of us.  It was just one jerk, really… but one spoiled everything.

Jim was still foreman on that job for another two weeks – while we frosted him. Then, out of the blue, the union announced that contract negotiations had broken down and there would be a city-wide strike.  When that all blew over, I found another job.  Plant Bros. was tainted for me.

Eric Johnson is a printer who writes stories about his work as a carpenter in San Francisco.

Harassment is Bad for Our Health

When I read the actress Salma Hayek’s op-ed in the New York Times about her stressful relationship with Harvey Weinstein, I had an immediate flash of recognition. When he ordered her to film a sex scene, she had a physical breakdown. She called it a nervous breakdown.

“My body began to shake uncontrollably, my breath was short and I began to cry and cry, unable to stop, as if I were throwing up tears. My mind understood that I had to do it, but my body wouldn’t stop crying and convulsing.” Then she started throwing up. Her reaction wasn’t just about doing a sex scene. It was the result of many years of physical and (mostly) psychological harassment from this powerful man.

Harassment and bullying can cause stress that manifests in physical health problems that affect our work and lives. Women in male-dominated fields like construction understand this connection between stress and physical illness because it happens to us.

In 1981 I worked as the only female electrician on a big construction site in San Francisco. Two other women also worked on that site and we sought each other out at lunch breaks. Cece, a black woman, was one of the very first of us to make it into the elevator constructor trade. She was a “helper.” She told me stories about her relationship with her violent white supremacist journeyman that made me fear for her life. Juanita, a carpenter, was Mexican-American. I saw comments about her written in the porta potties. “The little woman carpenter takes it in the ass.” Then others had crossed out ass and written in other orifices. It was a game with the men and it appeared they all participated.

As the weeks went on, both these women began having health problems. Cece disappeared from the job and I learned she had fallen ill with some undiagnosable stomach ailment and landed in the hospital (she had to leave her trade as a result). Then Juanita, who seldom was able to eat much at lunch, didn’t come to work one day.

My tool buddy on that job—the only guy who would work with me—had my back. But one day he decided to drag up—to quit the job—and I was left on my own. Without my protector, I too became ill and had to leave the job.

All three of us women had worked hard to get into our trades and we were proud of our status as the first females. We were determined to succeed. But even though our minds told us we had to go to work, our bodies rebelled. We were forced to leave in spite of our commitment to stay.

The same thing happened to Shannon Faulkner, the first woman to be admitted to the Citadel military academy in 1995. She was well prepared physically, but it was the stress and its physical manifestations that did her in. She dropped out after four days of pledge week citing emotional and psychological abuse and physical exhaustion. She was derided by men as a wimp and by women because she made us look bad. Few believed that the stress of a hostile environment caused her failure.

It’s time we start to believe.

Daddy From Another Planet

Photo by David Menidrey on Unsplash

As a young feminist I tried responding to male groping by groping back, pinching male butts at parties, just as I’d been pinched. I treated all men equally, pinching and groping without discrimination. That got me in trouble with male friends who were outraged—partly at my forwardness (women can’t do that!), but also that I’d think they might do that to women. They really didn’t like being treated as objects. Well, neither did I. It’s the opposite of sexy.

So, ok, some men don’t grope women. All men are not afflicted with frotteurism, the psychologists’ word for the desire to grope unconsenting victims. But, as we’re now learning, oh so many are. My father was one.

I saw him do it. One time at the end of a party in the grange hall, he walked up behind a woman who was taking dishes into the kitchen and grabbed her breasts with both hands in a kind of bear hug. She just kept walking and I yelled at him. I don’t think he even knew who that woman was. He was drunk, so that was his excuse, but he didn’t apologize or even seem to think he needed an excuse. WTF Dad!

And there were many other times, when we gathered in groups and alcohol was present. With Dad, alcohol was always present.

In 1978 my parents traveled to visit me in my collective house of four lesbians in San Francisco. I wasn’t yet out to Dad as gay and my mother asked me not to tell him. She made the argument that she would be the one to have to deal with him when they got home and she was only saving herself trouble. That made sense to me, but I refused to take down the lesbo posters or change anything about our lifestyle. Every day I’d ask Mom if Dad had figured it out yet. He never did (I came out to him a few years later).

By the end of the first day my dad had visited all the bars in the neighborhood, made friends with all the barflies and picked out his favorite bar where he would hang while Mom and I went to the theater or did only-in-San Francisco things.

One evening my roommate pulled me aside to tell me my father had groped her. I was stunned. You invite your father into your house and he gropes your housemates?! I struggled to understand. What was motivating him? Who would not see this as totally inappropriate, or at least extremely rude behavior? But, as I remember, he never apologized, even after being confronted. He wanted to pretend it didn’t happen. I wonder if my father would have groped my roommates if he’d known that we were all lesbians, but I doubt that knowledge would have made a difference.

In every other way Dad behaved like a proper gentleman, a courteous guy who seemed to want everyone to be comfortable. He didn’t swear and wasn’t happy when I took up swearing. He used to lecture me that it takes fewer face muscles to smile than to frown. He believed in smiling and I’ve come around to his view. I just hated it when men told me to smile, which happened with regularity in my work as an electrician.

Dad was a working class guy who never finished high school, but he wasn’t closed-minded. He believed in equality of the sexes and was politically progressive. Of course, he and all of us kids were influenced by my mother, an accomplished woman who’d made her own way in the worlds of work and war for many years before marrying.

My father was a product of his times from a generation of men who could be categorized by the female body parts they most ogled. George H.W. Bush is a butt man. Dad was a tit man. They were born ten years apart—GHWB in 1924 and my father in 1914, so I’d say they were of the same generation in which popular culture permitted and encouraged ogling and even physical violence against women. Men aspired to be “David Cop-a-Feel.” Beating wives and children was accepted practice.

We all have a natural curiosity about people’s bodies. I’ve always been fascinated by bodies in the public baths or sauna. They are so varied! And we are usually so clothed! But, although I believe consensual touching is something no human should be without, I never had an unrestrained desire to touch them, men or women.

One theory about groping comes down to something called projective identification. According to psychologists it’s a pretty common process in human nature that basically means you attempt to make others feel a way you don’t want to feel yourself. The desire to grope unconsenting victims, frotteurism, is a paraphilia.  Paraphilia is intense sexual interest and arousal by objects, body parts, fantasies, or situations that do not ordinarily stimulate sexual desires.  Masochism or a foot fetish, for example, are paraphilias. Was groping an affliction that my father could not overcome? Is it really a sickness? Is there a cure? (apparently not–all these rehab programs are bullshit). But of course it’s much more complicated and we all acknowledge there’s an underlying power dynamic. Dad called himself a feminist and I think he truly did like women, but some Neanderthal part of him must have seen women as less than.

I still struggle to understand. Was my father even aware of his reputation as a groper, or did he practice self-deception? Was he ever ashamed? What was going on in his head? How did he rationalize this behavior? Did he know he was causing women discomfort? What did he think was going on for them? I did have some heart-to-hearts with him, but never on this subject.

Women in general don’t get it. We are from different cultures in a way. Men’s behavior is reinforced within their own male culture. But when I ask male friends to explain the disgusting behavior exhibited by their gender, they claim to be as perplexed as I, saying it’s a sickness or that (other) men do it just to see if they can get away with it.

This is some odd tic of the male of the species that just doesn’t resonate with me. It’s like daddy from another planet. The same species, but different. I can’t really explain it and I bet if I could ask my dad, he couldn’t either.

Sexual Harassment is Old News for Women in Trades

In the wake of harassment allegations against sexual predators including movie moguls and our president, tradeswomen applaud women who are telling their stories and rising up against this outrage.

Women in male-dominated occupations have been fighting this fight for as long as we can remember. We’ve been on the front lines of the feminist movement for decades defending our sisters, supporting legislation to protect women against sexual harassment and helping employers and unions see their responsibility on this issue. We and our fight have been invisible except to each other. Every female construction worker has experienced harassment and all of us can say #Metoo.

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Taped on the counter at my supply house, 1983. Sealtite is a type of electrical conduit.

In 1980 I worked as the only female electrician on a big construction job in San Francisco. That’s how it was for us then, and that’s how it still is. Women make up less than three percent of the construction workforce. We are often alone in a crowd of hundreds of men.

I would do my job, dressed in boots, hard hat and work clothes just like the men, looking over my shoulder anticipating violence and hostility. In the porta potties amidst the ubiquitous dicks drawn on the walls would be my name underneath the sentiment “I WANT TO FUCK YOU.” I was called “the cunt.”

I spent my working life in what we now call a hostile work environment. We had no word for it then. There was no recourse. You could complain to your foreman or your union rep but they would tell you that the harassment was your own fault and if you couldn’t take it you should leave the job. You loved the work and you loved the paycheck and so you kept your mouth shut and your head down. And you depended on male allies. My tool buddy on that job—the only guy who would work with me—was a Hispanic/native man whose family had been in California since it was still part of Mexico. He had my back.

Some things have changed since then and the changes are the direct result of feminist organizing. In the 1970s tradeswomen who had been the target of harassment began to bring lawsuits against employers. They lost. When the civil rights activist Eleanor Holmes Norton, as chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under President Jimmy Carter, released regulations declaring sexual harassment to be discrimination under federal law, women finally had legal backing.

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Sister electrician Lyn Shimizu pointing out graffiti on the SF opera house job, 1997

In the 1986 Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson case, the Supreme Court distinguished between and prohibited two kinds of sexual harassment. Quid pro quo harassment occurred when women were made offers such as a promotion in exchange for a sexual favor. Equally important, however, was the hostile environment harassment where men could make the everyday workplace into a place of threats, hostility, offensive images, abusive language. This is the kind of harassment tradeswomen most frequently endure.

The movie North Country dramatized conditions that led to the first class action sexual harassment lawsuit filed in 1988 by Lois Jensen and female miners at the Eveleth Taconite Company in Minnesota. After these women won a $3.5 million settlement, employers began to take notice. Our working conditions began to improve.

We were helped by a few dedicated lawyers. In San Francisco we were lucky to work with attorneys at Equal Rights Advocates and Employment Law Center. Other legal groups included the National Women’s Law Center and the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund (today Legal Momentum).

That sexual harassment is now against the law is the one big change tradeswomen have noticed over the years that has improved our working lives in a male-dominated workplace. In many other ways our workplace environment hasn’t changed that much. We are still underemployed, last hired and first fired, often poorly trained and generally undervalued. Yet some tradeswomen have had successful careers and are retiring with good pensions. Some have become apprenticeship directors, union business agents, and chairs of state building trades councils. We have built organizations and networks across the country to improve our lot. I just returned from our national conference, this year in Chicago, Women Build Nations. It started as Women Building California, sponsored by the California Building Trades Council and Tradeswomen Inc. in 2001 and has now become international, this year sponsored by the National Building Trades Unions and Chicago Women in Trades. A record 1600 women and male allies attended. Workshops on sexual harassment were featured, as always. But the construction industry now has policies in place to train workers and to prevent harassment.

Tradeswomen are glad sexual harassment is now a mainstream issue, but for us it’s nothing new. We’ve been resisting for decades and still we persist.