It Starts Out Simple Enough: Second in a Two-Part Series

by Yvonne Martinez, 2008-04-03

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the second of Yvonne Martinez’s two-part account of her experiencing sexual harassment as a labor organizer. The first part is below.

The only thing I could summon at the time was contempt with the confirmation that I got to him bad enough to warrant a below the belt sucker punch. The message was clear. You do that again and I will demean you sexually. I left that organization for other reasons, and didn’t complain about what he had done to me. I did what lots of us do. I internalized it. If I didn’t admit it, it didn’t happen. If it didn’t happen, I wouldn’t have to deal with it, or so I thought. I continued to do my job and learned new ways to fight, contorted though it was, with one hand up in a fist and the other hand tied behind my back.

I got another job with a rival union. Things went well in the new job, well enough for me to be transferred to the Portland office to take on a bigger assignment.

The Portland staff held informal case meetings that anyone could attend, where we discussed various strategies to deal with the employers we organized against. The office dinosaur rarely joined us. Content to listen from behind his desk with his office door open, his scaly slime-eking tail rolled around the doorway.

One day, he decided to join our table. Two of my three colleagues got up and left. Trained in a method of case discussion that welcomed discourse, I was interested in what kind of a case he would bring.

His mixed and matched polo pony shirt, sweater and trousers were in the autumn colors his wife laid out for him. His clothes mocked his Rodan persona. He was central casting for George Meany era reactionary labor thugs, the type who considered process oriented public sector union organizers like myself to be social workers.

“What if you have a guy, a jail janitor, who every time you turn around he’s crying harassment,” he said. “Is that a statement or a question?” I asked.

“All the boss wants to do is change his shift,” he replied. “So what’s the question?” I asked. “The contract isn’t clear about shift changes. So the boss can change him, right?”

“Depends,” I said. “Is there a pattern? Is he the only one that this is happening to? What other rules apply?”

“Hold on, hold on,” he said. “The guy is just a janitor who sweeps out cells and cleans up inmate shit.”

“So?” Smelling a “dump truck” I said. “Have you even read his file?”

His embroidered polo pony moved up his left chest as he stretched his arms over his head and pushed out his feet. “Yeah, I read it. It says he’s on graveyard because he likes to pinch women’s tits.”

“I’ll bet it does.” I leaned in to him crossing my arms over my chest. His arms down now he stretched over the table and picked up a blank sheet of paper that was lying there and held it like he was prepared to read from it.

“Here, I’ll read it for you,” he said. He looked up over his glasses and stared at my arms like he was trying to see through them to my breasts.

“Stop right there,” I said, staring right back at him. “I’m putting you on notice. Your conduct is offensive.” He folded his polo pony behind his arms.

“He likes to do other stuff too,” he said. He leaned back over the table and brought the piece of paper back up to his sight.

“You’ve been warned, if you continue, your conduct will constitute harassment,” I said. “Goddamn it to hell,” he said. “Now, you are swearing,” I said calmly. I took another sheet of paper and made notes, looked at my watch, noted the time.

He grabbed his blank sheet of paper, wadded it up and threw it down. He pushed up from the table, almost knocking the chair over and lumbered back to his office and slammed the door shut.

My remaining colleague and I just sat and stared at each other. Later that day, I asked my colleague if he would be willing to be a witness to what just happened. To his credit, he said he would.

What followed was months of terror. My office was trashed. My files rifled. He got my secretary to give him copies of all my correspondence. Sudden and loud crashes occurred outside my door. Midnight phone calls. My car was scratched.

I informally went to the bosses. The bosses did nothing. “We know he’s an asshole,” they said. “He’s just an asshole to everybody. It’s nothing personal.”

When the dinosaur couldn’t use me to justify dump trucking a case, he had to demean me. It was a new twist on harassment, sexual and racial. The issue was the same, a contest for power.

The harassment only stopped when there was a regime change at the union and the dinosaur was reassigned to Siberia.

San Francisco:

One of my many stops during this period of strike organizing was to take a job in San Francisco. There, the harassment was weird bordering on bizarre.

I had just successfully organized testimony to stop the closure of yet another public hospital. The testimony complete, my new boss, a candidate for comb-over counseling and I sat in the ornate, and beautifully sculpted public hearing room at City Hall.

Following videotaped and in-person testimony by hospital residents, the appropriate public condemnation was delivered by the necessary complement of sitting elected officials. I knew we hit the mark when the politicians went out of their way to condemn any threat of closing the hospital. And when the local Business Journal days later denounced the testimony, the victory was confirmed.

I sat in the splendor of the hearing room in awe of the resident’s courage. They’d come to the hearing in wheel chairs and by special ambulance and at great personal discomfort from their hospital beds to speak to the powerful about their fear of being put out on the street so that liberals could feel good about “de-institutionalization.”

The contrast in the conditions in which the residents lived at the turn of the century fortress hospital that was their home and the ornate hearing room where the powerful deliberated their fate was astounding. Shimmering chandeliers, sculpted wood and marble, contrast to urine stained stairwells, paint chipped turrets, dirty windows, antiquated equipment and staffing shortages.

My boss’s boss had been at the hearing and had personally acknowledged the work we’d accomplished before taking her leave from the hearing. Before leaving, she handed me her handwritten notes. I held her notes in my lap to review them to see if we needed to add more to the hearing record.

My immediate boss sat next to me in the wooden pews in the middle of the hearing room. We sat on either side of a sculpted armrest. Our boss’s notes in my lap, I couldn’t help but notice that the hair on his fingers was moving along the wooden grooves of the armrest. It looked like he was rubbing it. I looked back at the notes on my lap.

Through the side of my eyes, I could see that he was manipulating the curves of the wood, rubbing the wood harder and harder as if to sexually stimulate it. I looked up at him and he was staring at me with his tongue against his cheek, his eyes on my breasts. I got up and moved across the aisle.

Here it was again, demeaning sexual objectification in response to a successful demonstration of power.

I had been hired as a temporary at this union and therefore had no job protection, and if offered a permanent assignment would have to go through a lengthy probation. The armrest rubber knew that.

On another occasion, the armrest rubber planted his feet squarely on top of mine under a conference table where I was leading an arbitration preparation meeting for a junior colleague. I felt something on top of my feet, not sure if something this weird could be happening, his feet on top of mine under the conference table on the eleventh floor of a building near downtown San Francisco.

Committed to finishing my argument, feet or no feet, I carried on. He stared right at me and dug his feet in. I stared back. I knew he knew. He had to be sure I did. Feet or no feet, just like with the tongue-wagger, I continued what I was doing, prepared to go on to finish the job.

Later, when I had time to think about what had happened, it occurred to me that this had taken some forethought on the foot mashers part. She sits down and I will put my feet on top hers. That’ll shut her up.

How practiced too. If caught, an easy retreat. Oh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t know those were your feet. The weirdness of it and the symbolism of being under foot was unmistakable.

What became obvious in my dealings with the armrest rubber cum foot masher was that his limited skill at the bargaining table. And even though I had bargained hundreds of contracts, the only position I was offered at the bargaining table was as his secretary. I declined his offer.

I witnessed him discount and disrespect the testimony of his own members (women mostly), as they told management about what they faced in Maternity Wards in public hospitals. It was heart-breaking to hear their eloquent and passionate testimony given short shrift because the tongue-wagger didn’t know how to manage the power of it. Instead, he appeared to be more worried about protecting his relationship with the hospital’s management representative.

As time went on, I’d learned to expect “inadvertent” elbows at my breast, tongue-wagging stares, exclusions critical meetings, accusations that I was trying to undermine him, an attempt to remove me from the premises and finally a contrived complaint against me.

For the first time in all the years that I have done this work, I decided to formally complain when the armrest rubber, cum foot masher, attempted use a complaint he’d contrived to issue a disciplinary action against me. He was determined to discredit me when, I learned, he became afraid that I would get his job during a union restructuring. I had no interest or intention of doing so, but like the tongue-wagger, I learned that it is his fear and distorted perception that creates the problem.

This time I complained because my reputation was at stake, and following the convention, I had become hopeful about the new direction the union as a whole was taking.

Complaining isn’t easy, even for union organizers. The process itself is simple enough, but the psychic cost is immense. I had to do it one stretch of time at a time, sometimes by minutes, hours, days, or just seconds at a time. Each step I took made way for the next.

Along the way, I had to make peace with myself and I had to reach back to all of what I had internalized. I had nightmares, flashbacks, and became depressed. Through it all, I had to forgive myself and I had to be willing to forgive the perpetrator. It didn’t mean I actually had to forgive him. It meant I had to be willing to. It was the only way I could get free. I also learned that forgiveness does not have to be cheap. It could and would take its time.

Slowly I let go of any attachment to grandiose victories, and I learned to be grateful for simple but meaningful everyday redemptions. As the path became clearer, I knew that I wanted nothing more than to stand up for my good name.

When I finally complained, I complained not because sexual harassment policies existed, policies have always existed - but because after the union’s merger, women had came into increasing power and I had developed relationships with many of them and they knew and respected my work. I had learned to trust them.

Even so, I sought the help of a law firm to advise me about the best strategy to employ. “Be prepared,” the lawyer said. “Once you raise this in any formal way, you risk being labeled as a capital C complainer,” he emphasized. I had to weigh this ignominy against the further trashing of my reputation by my old boss with a new boss.

I took a trusted male colleague with me to the meeting with Union’s new chief of staff. My colleague was a man who earned his movement stripes in South Africa. He stood by me, even though he and I were both on probation at the time. I will always remember his courage and support. And I will always be grateful for the demonstrated compassion and understanding from the Chief of Staff who heard my complaint.

The day of the complaint, my colleague and I walked into a room that had been named for a deceased member leader. A member leader I’d met twenty years before, when I’d come to California from Oregon as a new union organizer to an International union convention. This member leader and I organized the first ever women of color caucus at that convention. What sweet symmetry I thought, to be in Lorraine’s room. I felt like I was being true to what we’d set out to do all those years before and that she was there in the room with me.

My notes in hand, I outlined in two hours what had happened to me over two years. Part of the difficulty was that I had to protect the institution I love and the work I have given my life to do at the same time that I had to protect myself from it.

My steps, though cautious and tentative at first, had the desired effect. The perpetrator was exposed and I was given another assignment. Even now he continues to stand too close to me, the last time right behind me and directs angry hateful glares my way.

No matter how many years of therapy I’ve had or self help groups I’ve attended, strikes I’ve led, bosses I’ve fought, I know I will miss some, if not most of what comes at me. It’s so pervasive, it’s a given that I will. So I’ve learned to go in forgiving myself, knowing that I won’t get it all. That some of it will get by me. Or even get me.

It’s okay. I will fight the ones I see. And, with help, we will win some too.