After writing On Feminisms: One Feminists Story I’ve been wanting to follow up on the diary with some thoughts on gender equality in the work place, the recent trend of companies to have diversity programs and also how companies used to deal with harassment cases compared to how they’re dealt with now. Many of the comments I received after writing the diary had to do with harassment in the work place and I thought the subject deserved some more discussion. What used to be ignored that should not have been? What used to be ignored that still should be? What are the solutions if any to equality in the work place and real acceptance of diversity? What are the obstacles and what will it take to overcome them?
I remember first coming into the plants, and not knowing what to expect, and generally being treated well by the other people I worked with, but those were really different times. They were the days of working with the animals. Using the bathrooms was optional, Playboy magazines everywhere, people playing pranks on each other. Guys making a game of seeing if they could nail someone with a bucket of water after it had ran over a number of particularly dirty pipes loaded with coal dust. This was done so much to one of the management people that he wouldn’t go out in the plant without a rain suit on for years. Of course they would have fired whoever was doing it if they ever caught them, but they never did.
There were occasional fights, and fistfights. Not just people yelling at each other and then also incidents that never went to that extreme but got close. If someone eventually had enough of another guy’s crap, that guy might just find himself on the other end of a knuckle sandwich. Usually in the end they’d either make up, or if they didn’t, that would be the end of it and they’d stay away from each other. There was always a lot of horse-play and grab-assing.
One time one of our electricians got sick of another one aggravating him, and he just calmly walked over to his locker, and ripped the handle right off the front of it, threw it on the ground, and sat back down and returned to his coffee at break. He got the hint and that was the end of it. There was another ongoing feud between a couple of electricians where one of them would come in, and stick his finger in the other one’s coffee every morning and then ask him how his coffee tasted. Of course then he’d have to throw it out and get another cup. One morning he got tired of it and put a megger lead his coffee cup, turned it on, and covered the megger with some rags, and when the other electrician stuck his finger in the guy’s cup, he got hit with about 15,000 volts (hardly any amps so it didn’t harm him but he got one hell of a jolt!). He never stuck his finger in his coffee again....lol. And they were friends. The foremen really didn’t want to know about the problems when they went on and ignored the horse-play, and generally and stayed out of it unless something looked like it was going to get out of control, or if people weren’t getting their work done.
Slowly things started changing. First to go were the magazines and pin-ups at our plant. That pretty much came to a complete screeching halt as to even what people had in their lockers and not just on them when they decided to bring in a girl scout troop for a tour, and one of the kids got a look at a pin-up in someone’s locker (which they really should have not seen to begin with since they had no business being in our locker room, and yes it was a picture on a woman’s locker, but that was besides the point), and that was the end of the magazines, the calendars, and all of the pin-ups. Take ‘em down no matter where they’re at....NOW!! You’d think they would have had enough sense to have maybe thought about taking down the stuff BEFORE they brought the kids through there, but they didn’t. That wasn’t the first tour to go through the plants by a long shot either, and not the first tour that could have come across a lot worse stuff than what they saw in my friend’s locker.
The reason for my wanting to relay that incident is that it’s really a microcosm for how they’ve gone about taking care of all of the harassment problems at work. They’re usually reactive, and rarely proactive, and even when they are proactive, it’s usually either too little too late, or over reaction and over reaching. This gets to the heart of what I wanted to write about here and how we’ve gone from one extreme to the other, and how the solutions the company has come up with really don’t solve the core of the problem. They seem to purely be a reaction to avoiding law suits, and not for genuine care of the promotion of equality in the work place.
We’ve gone from the days of the animals to the days where everyone is afraid to even joke around any more since someone might get offended with something another person says, and run to the HR department and then its inquisition time, and that’s happened all too often in the last few years. When in the old days two guys who didn’t like each other might slug it out, now it’s one of them trying to get the other one fired because they had a verbal disagreement. Now they run around doing occasional searches of what everyone has sitting on their desks and were almost going to discipline someone for a fitness magazine it’s gotten so extreme. I’m happy not to have to put up with the extreme stuff that went on that I wrote about in the previous diary, but now I see a work force that’s been tamed and neutered with what their actions are, but despite that you can’t control how people think, and you can’t force people to respect each other, and you can’t force people not to be sexist or a racist. You might be able to keep them from expressing those things openly, but you can’t force the bigotries go away.
This brings me to the other thing that I’ve seen them do to try to get everyone to just get along, and that’s Diversity Training. About 20 years too late, they decided that if they just talk to everyone about what a great thing diversity is, and have some films on the benefits of a diverse work place, and have a nice lunch every so often where they offer up some menus from all around the world, all of the problems will just magically melt away, and everyone will welcome those who are different with open arms. I hate to tell them, but it doesn’t quite work that way.
First of all, no one in those plants welcomed diversity when I came in there as one of the earlier women, and they didn’t welcome diversity when the first black men came in. If they had shown those films to those guys ages ago they would have been laughed out of the room and openly mocked. There would probably have been people walking out of the room and telling them they had some real work to do. Accepting diversity in the work place is something that comes with time, and from working with people who are not like you, and from those people earning the respect of the others they are working with, and it cannot be taught to someone. It’s learned through experience and not through lectures. It’s learned from having that person who you didn’t think belonged there or didn’t like having there working right there with you whether you like it or not, and people getting over themselves. And it happens over time and sometimes it never happens at all with certain people.
If companies wanted to truly try to show by their actions that they want diverse work places, they might try looking to their own board rooms, and the lack of minorities and women that there are there. It’s still the rich white-boys’ club at the top, and until they have more women and minorities in leadership positions, they’re talking a good game, but that’s about it. A lot of talk.