By Tamara Desiatov
PERTH — After two long years of battling against victimisation and sexual discrimination in employment, Gail McIntosh and Heather Horne on April 21 were awarded $92,000 in compensation by the Equal Opportunity Commission.
The case concerned explicit pornographic pictures all over the construction site where they worked as trades assistants (known on site as "peggies") at Jervoise Bay, south of Fremantle, as employees of Press Clough Joint Venture.
McIntosh and Horne claimed the employer and the Metal and Engineering Workers' Union of WA did nothing to stop harassment from other workers after they complained about the hard-core pornography on the site. The MEWU is considering whether to appeal the decision.
The women were the only female blue collar workers on the site, they told Green Left Weekly, in a work force which at its peak comprised some 600 workers. As peggies their duties included cleaning the amenities and crib rooms. What confronted them was sexually explicit pictures on the walls of the rooms they were cleaning.
They had put up with "soft porn", but one of the pictures was explicit. Heather and Gail both immediately complained to the site supervisor, Jock Watt. He said he would investigate but the poster was not removed, and a "Press Clough Joint Venture" sticker was affixed to it.
They asked for another explicit picture, belonging to a shop steward, to be removed. It was, but only after an angry confrontation. This incident unleashed verbal abuse and hostility against the women from the male workers, and there was an increase in the number of posters being put up.
They found this display in their workplace not only "highly offensive and degrading, but frightening", because they had to work alongside these men.
The women removed the posters when an MEWU site organiser, Bob Dalrymple, indicated agreement. This created general uproar. Dalrymple said he didn't agree with the women, but his "hands were tied because of some law he'd heard of".
He went on to say that this kind of attitude from the women would make them very unpopular on site, and it could even lead the men to go on strike; if that happened they would get little or no support from the union. He also said that they might find themselves on a black list for any more trouble.
The men on the workplace had the idea "that these women had no right to bring a woman's perspective into it; they were lucky to have jobs, and if they wanted to work in a male environment, they would just have to cop it".
In August 1991, Horne took the situation to Jock Ferguson, the assistant state secretary of the MEWU, asking for him or the state leadership to intervene. Horne felt that the situation could be remedied if the union were to demonstrate leadership and make it clear to the male members that pornographic material was not suitable for the workplace. She suggested that shop stewards and union officials should attend equal opportunity courses, because they were obviously unaware of the Sexual Discrimination Act. No action was taken.
Horne spoke to the employer's industrial relations and personnel manager about the company's affirmative action policy and things which might be done, such as the employment of more women. Nothing changed.
The number of posters increased; they appeared even in the union site office. "The union which was supposed to represent my interest was attacking me with this material, and obviously condoning it by allowing it to be there". That's when Horne left work.
"We're really elated by the decision", Gail said when I interviewed them. "We think it's really important for women to be able to work alongside other workers. I think that the implications are going to be a lot bigger than we imagined, but we are both confident."
Heather added, "It's been over two years since we made the complaint with the Equal Opportunity Commission, and it's taken a long time. It's been a great relief to me that our positions have finally been vindicated."
On the union's role, Gail said, "We are both pretty disappointed in that we feel that they are defending the rights of their members to discriminate against women. They haven't definitely said that they'd appeal, so they've got 21 days. We'll wait three weeks and see what happens.
"They are talking about shop stewards as making their own decisions. The legal argument they're using is that the shop stewards are elected by their members and don't have any power given to them by the union, or the shop stewards don't have any powers to represent the union, but they are mediators between the members and the union. They are looking it as if the shop stewards are individuals, rather than seeing a shop steward working in a union site with unionised workers."
Heather thought it "quite ironic that we are in a position to defend ourselves, or our positions, from our own union. Right from the beginning, we've had difficulty in understanding why the union was taking the position where it feels it has to defend the rights of our fellow members who put up the pornography, and not our rights as workers, as equals in a working environment."
What advice would they give to other women who are considering working in areas that are male-dominated or non-traditional?
Heather would "encourage women to take up a career in non-traditional occupations. It's getting past the hurdles of sexism and being in a male-dominated environment. This decision means a lot for women and gives a clear warning to unions and employers that they must pay more than lip-service to equal opportunity."
Asked how women should respond to sexual harassment, Heather replied, "You've got to have realistic expectations. You have to approach it with some foresight because there's no guarantee of winning, from the legal point of view. Be prepared to sacrifice your income, career and be black-listed from work; you've also got the legal cost to deal with. I've been unemployed for two years since the incident.
"We do not say it was easy, but we are positive that the issue had to be confronted. Anything less is capitulation. We must do what we know to be right, to stop what we know to be wrong. The Equal Opportunity Act has, in many circumstances, changed that moral imperative into a legally enforceable obligation.
"Women have the right to work in an environment free and safe from sexist prejudice."