Misrepresented: women fight harassment and the union boys' club.

• Author: Colatosti, Camille

When the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission sued Mitsubishi in April in a historic class-action suit claiming that as many as 500 women workers had suffered sexual harassment, the company had egg on its face, but so did the union.

"It seems like the numbers are a lot higher than what we were aware of," confessed Donald Shelby, vice president of the United Auto Workers Local 2488. Shelby also said that he thought Mitsubishi had tried to improve the workplace for women in the last year.

But the seriousness of the allegations against Mitsubishi belie that claim. The EEOC charged that harassment at the Mitsubishi plant in Normal, Illinois, was "standard operating procedure." According to the EEOC, women workers complained of groping, crude graffiti, and derogatory epithets. Male supervisors and line workers rubbed their genitals against female workers, and masturbated while staring at the women working beside them, the EEOC said. The EEOC report also alleges that managers coerced some women into performing sex acts.

For many working women, especially those employed in blue-collar jobs traditionally held by men, the allegations come as no surprise. Sexual harassment is a fact of life for them. And while ultimately it is the employer's responsibility to provide a harassment-free workplace, it is also the obligation of the union to represent all workers fairly and to ensure that management enforces the contract.

The bargaining agreement between Mitsubishi and the United Auto Workers Local 2488 included an anti-discrimination clause opposing "any type of harassment or discrimination." But, says Cynthia Pierre, deputy director of the EEOC's regional office in Chicago, the union did not ensure that the company enforced this clause. "The union really did not help alleviate women's mistreatment," Pierre says.

Sexual-harassment problems persist for union women in part because the majority of union officials are male. While women compose a larger percentage of the unionized work force than ever before in the United States--37 percent--they make up only about 8 percent of elected and appointed union officials.

And in many blue-collar jobs, women are still dramatically underrepresented. Only 2.3 percent of construction workers are women, for example. Only 8.9 percent of precision production workers and 3.6 percent of mineworkers are female.

"At a work site, we're usually a minority of one," says Mary Baird, a founding member of Cleveland's Hard Hatted Women, a group of female construction workers. As one tradeswoman explains, "Being the only woman on a construction site [means] having no one to relate to, not having rest-room facilities, having to speak up for myself on issues that I feel are unfair practices at work, and not having any support."

To fight isolation, some women form workplace committees. The Women's Action Group is a committee in a building-trades local at a large electronics company in Massachusetts. The committee came together to support three women who had experienced sexual harassment from coworkers.

"In each case, the women were advancing to higher levels than the men approved of, in mostly male job areas," says Jean Alonso, a leader of the committee. "The attacks were attempts to intimidate the women and to force them to give up their positions. The attacks were gross in nature--smearing of faces, taunting about menstrual blood, and men exposing themselves. Men even formed a...