The company learns that a worker is sexually harassing his female colleagues and begins an investigation. But its investigation is slow-going, the company claims, because other workers are not cooperative.
One day the worker commits a sexual act in his cubicle in front of a female worker. The company says it is final straw. He is suspended and then fired.
Though the events happened in 1994, the case involving an Ameritech service representative is back in court. Initially, a federal court in Indianapolis ruled against Chicago-based Ameritech Corp., concluding the company had moved too slowly. Instead, the court ruled last fall in favor of three female workers, who sought damages from the company.
For 19 years, the women claimed, the service representative had harassed 18 female co-workers, and the company should not have let such behavior linger for so long.
The jury granted $1.1 million in damages, an amount later reduced by a federal judge to about $600,000. Still, that is the highest such award Ameritech has ever faced in Indiana on harassment charges, according to company officials in Indianapolis.
Disputing the claim that it did not protect the female workers, Ameritech filed an appeal this week against the ruling. “Our position is that what could we have done? We fired the guy,” said Lee Ann Hoy, an Ameritech spokeswoman in Indianapolis.
Controversy on the menu: The Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union is crowing about a ruling this week from a National Labor Relations Board administrative law judge that comes down on Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises and its Tucci Milan restaurant in downtown Chicago, which it operates as a partner.
But the company, which has 40 restaurants in the Chicago-area– all of them without unions–does not think the union has that much to celebrate.
The NLRB judge did not order the company to bargain with the union, says Richard Marcus, an attorney for the firm. Nor, he adds, did the judge uphold a hefty award against the firm.
Except for being ordered to rehire a worker fired three years ago and to pay him back wages, “there is almost nothing to appeal,” says Marcus.
Nonetheless, Sarah Vanderwicken, who represented the union, sees the ruling as a victory because it shows that the company “stopped at nothing” to keep the union out of Tucci Milan.
Over a decade ago, the union represented workers at over 100 Chicago restaurants. Now it is down to about a dozen, and it blames that situation on the resistance it has faced from firms like Richard Melman’s Lettuce Entertain You. Most of the union restaurants have long since gone out of business, replies Marcus, who once represented Chicago’s restaurant owners with the union.
After a several monthlong organizing drive, the Tucci Milan workers voted in January 1995 by a 2-1 margin against the union, according to Marcus. Before the vote, however, Vanderwicken says most workers backed the union. Dismayed by the results, the union did not challenge the election, Vanderwicken says.
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While the judge rejected some of the union’s claims, he upheld others and ordered the restaurant to purge the disciplinary warnings given three former restaurant workers. The restaurant had a rule barring union solicitations on the job, but it had not enforced the policy, the judge said.
During the union drive, a union activist had also received a bomb threat. A restaurant official told workers about the threat, and said it probably was the union’s doing and workers’ lives could be endangered. That was a no-no, the judge said, and ordered the restaurant to post an explanatory notice for workers.
Dividing lines: Once we were prairie dogs. We lived in cubicles and popped up to peer over a tall office panel to chit-chat with neighbors. Now we live in a ranch-style cubicle; a desk with a view. Haworth Inc., an office-furniture maker in Holland, Mich., wants to hear from prairie dogs nationwide. They are conducting a survey, and the address is www.haworth-furn.com/prairiedog
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Stephen Franklin can be reached at [email protected]
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