Company-sanctioned sex parties. Rape-and-murder threats on the job. Lewd graffiti scrawled on cars as they rolled down assembly lines toward female employees.
Can this be the same plant in Normal, Ill., that Mitsubishi Motor Manufacturing of America hired Lynn Martin to probe?
Allegations raised in a government court document last week bear little resemblance to the bloodless findings in the former U.S. labor secretary’s Feb. 12 report.
Hired last year after the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission brought a massive sexual-harassment lawsuit, Martin found deficient policies, a lack of training and poor communications at the Japanese automaker. But she said nothing about a supervisor so bold in his harassment he acquired the nickname, “Chester the Molester,” as the EEOC alleges.
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That and other explosive details contained in the court filing cast a shadow over Martin’s review. So, too, does the news that EEOC investigators have subpoenaed Martin to answer questions under oath Monday and Tuesday about her relationship with the company.
Martin’s connection to Mitsubishi raises a broader issue as well about the pitfalls of a controversial corporate practice: hiring public figures with reputations for integrity to investigate high-profile company crises.
When Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. found itself charged with price-fixing two years ago, for instance, the agribusiness giant asked former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, a trade expert, to fashion a response to the allegations. In the midst of a race-discrimination scandal, Texaco tapped a famed ex-appeals court judge, A. Leon Higgenbotham, to review diversity programs.
More recently, when Nike Inc. was accused of operating sweatshops overseas, the athletic shoemaker brought in prominent civil rights leader and former United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young.
Turning to such political heavyweights for public redemption raises the potential for conflict. The corporate sponsors risk being accused of paying off a big shot to smother problems, instead of fixing them–accusations that emerged in the ADM, Nike, Texaco and Mitsubishi cases.
The public figures run an even greater risk: Their reputations can be tarnished for good.
At best, the relationship between a high-profile consultant and the company paying the bill is “very delicate,” said Richard A. Epstein, a University of Chicago professor specializing in employment law. “There is no set formula that works.”
No question, Martin brought impeccable credentials to her Mitsubishi assignment. She was a champion of women’s rights during her five terms in the House and her stint as President George Bush’s labor secretary in the early 1990s. Naturally, the public expected a lot.
Instead, it got remarkably little. Without ever addressing whether sexual harassment occurred at the Downstate plant, Martin dished up advice on policies and procedures that could apply to almost any company.
She went out of her way, in fact, to put Mitsubishi on a par with businesses in general. “Many of the weaknesses we found at MMMA are rife at other companies,” she said.
If the EEOC case holds water, Martin’s report will look like a whitewash, because the behavior described at Mitsubishi is hardly typical of the American workplace. An EEOC court document released last week describes “a workplace saturated with sexuality, most of it demeaning to women.”
Female employees at the plant were subjected to crude threats and forced to view pornography, including pictures from sex parties organized on company time, the federal agency says.
Male employees would fire air guns and shoot water at the breasts and buttocks of female colleagues. Supervisors would make “unwanted sexual advances with impunity” and routinely ignore complaints about abuse by others, the EEOC alleges.
Even months after Martin was hired, women at the plant were subjected to obscene comments, the court filing charges.
Mitsubishi is contesting the EEOC action, and it promised to review the latest EEOC filing “to determine if there are any issues raised that we have not already investigated.” Of the 29 alleged victims who filed a separate civil lawsuit, the company has settled with 27, reportedly paying out about $9.5 million.
So what does Martin say? She is expected to face hours of questioning before EEOC attorneys next week. Meanwhile, she’s unavailable for comment.
Her spokesman asserts that criticism of the Mitsubishi inquiry misses a crucial point. The sex harassment charges weren’t the point of her review, said Steve Hofman, project coordinator for the Lynn Martin task force that looked into Mitsubishi.
Martin never set out to investigate claims; she intended to propose recommendations that would make the plant a model workplace, said Hofman, a former assistant secretary of labor under Martin.
Wary of charges that it would be interfering with the government’s investigation, Martin’s team deliberately refused to hear workers who wanted to make specific charges of abuse, Hofman said.
“We said right at the beginning she was not going to be investigating cases,” he said. “She’s not a judge.”
Yet one EEtOC attorney asked, “How can you make sure it never happens again if you don’t investigate what happened?”
The fine lines Martin has tried to draw around her assignment will mean little if the EEOC proves its case. A public that trusted her to speak for women most likely will remember only that she never shared its outrage. At least some people today believe Martin ducked the main issue.
“She squirmed out of it by addressing policies and procedures,” said H. Candace Gorman, a Chicago attorney who represented plaintiffs in the recent race-discrimination case against R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co.
The potential fallout for Martin from detailed new accusations in the case could discourage other political figures from taking on similar tasks, Gorman said. “People are going to realize they’re being brought in for window-dressing. Respected people will shy away.”
Corporations, too, may think twice about hiring politicians in a crisis, said Anne H. Reilly, an associate professor at Loyola University Chicago, who specializes in corporate-crisis management.
“I really don’t think politicians can make the tough calls,” she said. “You’re losing a lot of the benefit if that person has a political profile to maintain.”
In the Mitsubishi case, Reilly believes, Martin’s position as a state political stalwart weakened her ability to conduct an aggressive review.
“She has not taken a strong stand here,” Reilly said. “I see someone who saw (sex harassment), but didn’t want to name it. If she was very critical of a manufacturer with sites in Illinois, there might be some underlying political pressure.”
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Despite the potential for conflict, at least some corporations in the future no doubt will run to prominent public figures in a crisis. The main reason is the publicity:
When Mitsubishi announced her appointment, Martin enjoyed the attention of a dozen or more TV cameras and a roomful of reporters. She refused to disclose how much Mitsubishi has paid for her services.
For the automaker, hiring Martin was the perfect way to recover from an earlier public-relations belly flop, when it bused 3,000 employees from the plant to picket EEOC offices in Chicago. The effort crumbled amid allegations that employees were coerced into making the trip.
Earlier this year, Nike got its money’s worth out of a similar public inquiry, but former UN ambassador Young took heat for it. He gave a mixed, generally favorable review of the athletic shoemaker’s operations, contradicting activists who had accused the company of mistreating workers in Asia and elsewhere.
During a 15-day visit to the Far East, Young found Nike’s factories to be clean and well-lighted. “There was no evidence of widespread and systematic abuse,” Young concluded.
The report received wide publicity, most of it favorable to Nike. Activists, in the meantime, blasted Young. “Nike has spent millions of dollars buying off major athletes. Now it’s bought off Andrew Young,” Medea Benjamin, president of the human-rights group Global Exchange, said.
That criticism didn’t faze Young, a spokesman for the former ambassador said.
Young took on the assignment as an “educational opportunity,” after becoming convinced that Nike had “good motives going into this,” the spokesman said. “He doesn’t feel this is something that damaged his reputation.”
To date, Martin feels the same way, though the jury is still out, Hofman said. If Mitsubishi follows through on her recommendations, as she believes it has done so far, she will be satisfied, Hofman said.
“She wants to see it succeed,” he said. “If it’s not a better company, she will feel she was not successful.”
She should not be surprised, though, when the public judges her performance as much by her reaction to Mitsubishi’s past behavior as her role in determining its future.