Women at work fight for a most basic right

For three years, Audrey Jo DeClue endured an endless stream of workplace abuses, according to a complaint filed in federal court.

DeClue, the first female line worker for the Central Illinois Light Co., said she had been shoved, hit and propositioned by male co- workers; had plied country roads in trucks fluttering with pornographic magazines; and had been subjected to the sight of men urinating on the ground in front of her.

So she sued the company for sexual harassment. Alas for her, the statute of limitations had expired for all but one of her grievances: Central Illinois Light's failure to respond to her repeated requests for a private place to relieve herself at work. Her whole case rested on the single issue of bathroom access. And a judicial panel ruled against her on that.

Ridiculous? Not for wage-earning women. Though the issue of bathroom access is virtually unknown in the white-collar world, it can be a flash point in factories, telephone calling centers, food- processing plants, construction sites, even schoolrooms. Lawyers, executives and journalists may hop off their chairs and seek relief at will, but employees at lower rungs of the economic ladder can be timed with stopwatches in the bathroom; stonewalled when they ask to go; given disciplinary points for frequent urination; even hunted down by supervisors with walkie-talkies if they tarry in the stalls.

"It's something out of the last century, but it's something out of this century as well," said Charley Richardson, director of labor extension at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell. He thinks bathroom access is being increasingly curtailed in certain workplaces as American businesses adopt Japanese production methods that link workers in interdependent teams. If one ducks out to the bathroom, the whole team flounders, he said.

While no agency keeps comprehensive statistics, occupational health specialists say they hear frequent complaints, especially from poultry workers, who cannot step away from fast-moving assembly lines without causing pileups of dead chickens. Then, said Jackie Nowell, health and safety officer for the United Food and Commercial Workers, which has organized some poultry plants, when a 10-minute rest break arrives, they use up the entire time just walking across cavernous plant floors and taking off their cumbersome rubber smocks and protective gear -- forget about getting to a toilet.

"I hear it a lot," said Nowell, who added that some workers resort to wearing adult diapers under their gear.

Factory workers are not the only ones afflicted. The Norfolk Southern railway runs hundreds of locomotives without flush toilets, only a "dry hopper system" consisting of a stool lined with a plastic bag. Train operators recently showed their derision by hurling the used bags off moving trains, but Norfolk Southern moved to restore order by printing employee numbers on the bags, and keeping track of which employees brought them back full.

When Marc Linder, a labor historian at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, surveyed a group of grade-school teachers in that state, more than half said they were pinned down in their classrooms for hours at a stretch, unable to relieve themselves. Most coped by avoiding coffee and water, but a few routinely wore sanitary pads to work and "11 percent of elementary schoolteachers brought all the children with them to the bathroom when they were unable to hold it any longer," Linder said.

Disturbed by such findings, he went on to be a co-author of a 244- page history of workplace bathroom practices in the United States and Europe, Void Where Prohibited (Cornell University Press, 1997). The title may be a pun but the rest of Linder's book is grim.

In Illinois, DeClue's high-voltage electrical crew worked in open farmland, with no gas stations or even trees to hide behind. Once, she ducked behind a bulldozer for cover, only to discover she was squatting directly in view of a homeowner who came out and excoriated her, then went back inside and reported her to the utility.

Her question for the court: Did the electric utility's failure to provide sanitation and privacy constitute harassment? A federal district judge in Peoria threw out the case last December. DeClue appealed. At the appellate level, the three-judge panel split revealingly along gender lines.

The two male judges conceded that women may be "more reticent about urinating in public than men," but said DeClue had erred by making her case on "hostile work environment" grounds rather than "disparate impact" grounds, and they could do nothing for her.

To that, the female panelist, the Reagan appointee Ilana Rovner, issued a remarkably personal dissent. She chided her colleagues for their "formulaic constructs" of gender discrimination. She wondered how eagerly a lone male would "drop his trousers" after bouncing around in a truck full of female co-workers and pornographic magazines. She recalled that as recently as the early 1990s, the seemingly trivial issue of bathroom access had the power to change the course of government: because there were no women's rooms convenient to the House and Senate chambers then, female legislators risked missing votes.

Legal scholars say that nearly a quarter century after President Jimmy Carter began naming large numbers of women and minorities to the federal bench, women jurists are lending a measurably more receptive ear than males to cries of gender discrimination. Rovner's opinion makes an illuminating example of that trend. She remembered her own appointment, and the welcoming note she received from a male judge who said, "At long last, the ladies' room off the conference room will have some use!"

"Thank goodness there was a woman's room," Rovner wrote, in a dissent some have interpreted as a call for more women to come forward with bathroom-access complaints.

Already, a case is moving through the lower levels of the same federal circuit, involving a female construction worker who says she was required to stay in position for a whole day with no chance to relieve herself. In her complaint, she says she heard a "pop" and wet herself. When a colleague took her to the hospital, she was fired for leaving her post.

2000Copyright
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