JUDY MIONE

&

PAMELA MARTENS

 

 

 

Today in #LaborHistory : October 9 -- via -- www.unionist.com

Retail stock brokerage Smith Barney reaches a tentative sexual harassment settlement with a group of female employees. The suit charged, among other things, that branch managers asked female workers to remove their tops in exchange for money and one office featured a "boom boom room" where women workers were encouraged to "entertain clients." The settlement was never finalized: a U.S. District Court Judge refused to approve the deal because it failed to adequately redress the plaintiff's grievances – 1997 

 

Multinational Monitor: What was your experience working as an investment broker?

Pamela Martens: In 1984, I started working as a stockbroker trainee at the Garden City, New York branch of Shearson, which became Smith Barney in December of that year [and more recently has been acquired by Citigroup]. Over the next decade, I experienced a variety of sexual harassment. The branch manager pull a gun on me shortly after I started. He constantly used foul and degrading language, especially toward women. In the sales meetings, for instance, he called the clerical workers "a pack of humps" and told the brokers that if they had to call their wives so many times, maybe they should "go home and lay between their legs." He also used anti-Semitic language such as, "you guys who nailed Jesus to the cross." He also used other language too vile to repeat.

Women were always verbally abused in myriad ways. I learned to grow my business by simply coming in in the morning, going to my private office and shutting the door and leaving promptly at 5 o’clock in the evening.

This was at a Fortune 100 company. The branch manager was trying to create an atmosphere of bravado for the male brokers. He also turned a storage room in the basement into what he called the "boom boom room," a name that was put on the company phone number list.

The first time I went down to the "boom boom room," there was a white toilet bowl hanging from the ceiling, and a bicycle hanging from the ceiling. The branch manager had taken a large garbage can, put a black plastic liner in it, and filled it with bloody mary mix. He was doling out drinks to the workers with a soup ladle. As I walked in one time, he twisted my arm and kissed me on the lips. I exited the room and never came back.

MM: What caused you to file the lawsuit after putting up with 10 years of this type of behavior?

Martens: On August 31, 1994 the branch manager called the 24 low-wage sales assistants, all of whom were women, into a meeting. He told them that if they did not volunteer their personal time for his favorite charity, they would be denied raises, bonuses and time off. If they went outside for a cigarette, they would be docked. If they went to a funeral, they wouldn’t get time off, but would be docked.

Then he called a meeting of the brokers, 95 percent of whom were men, because he was going to demand that they give him a check for his favorite charity. As a matter of fact, he had told the sales assistants, "You women have no money, so you’re going to donate your personal time. The brokers are going to give me a check." Because I had heard of this conduct right after the sales assistants’ meeting, I blasted him at the beginning of the brokers’ meeting before he could speak. I told him I was ashamed that I had not spoken up in the prior 10 years, but now there were 24 witnesses to his egregious conduct. He responded by yelling "We’ll throw you out of the office and throw a party afterwards."

On October 3, I wrote a letter to Jamie Dimon, who was then the president of Smith Barney, laying out the full 10 years of this branch manager’s conduct.

MM: What kind of response did you get from upper management?

Martens: Over the next few months, they gave the branch manager free reign to try to drive me out of the office. The branch manager told another broker that he was going to snap my neck, and told another broker in vile language I don’t want to repeat that he was going to rape me.

The general counsel of the firm called me and said that I should resign. When I didn’t and tried to stand my ground and be a positive role model for the other women, they decided that the branch manager would retire with full benefits. They threw a lavish retirement party for him at a private country club and two days later they fired me on the pretext that I had missed a meeting.

Along with two other women, I went and consulted with an attorney in New York, where we found out it wouldn’t be so easy to bring a lawsuit against the firm. They had set up a mandatory arbitration system for all employee disputes. The language that supposedly bound us to this was buried somewhere in our employee handbook.

But we also learned that class actions were not bound to end up in mandatory arbitration. So three of us — Judith Mione and Roberta O’Brien Thomann and myself — filed a class action suit on May 20, 1996.

A lot of other women around the country learned from the publicity generated by our case and called to join the suit. By October of 1996, an additional 23 women from 11 states had joined. By the time it was finally settled, 2,000 women had come forward with charges against the firm.

MM: Why did you opt out of the settlement?

Martens: Judith Mione and I opted out of the settlement because one of the purposes of the action was to stop the private justice system, which we felt encouraged sexual harassment and related activities, because if you know these things are never going to see the light of day in federal court, but will inevitably end up in a rigged, private arbitration system, then of course there is no real deterrent against that kind of conduct.

The final stage of the class action settlement agreement sent all the women into this system of private arbitration.

There were many other things wrong with the settlement.

http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm2002/02april/april02interviewmartens.html

PHOTO- Two plaintiffs in a major sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuit against Wall Street brokerage firm Smith Barney, Judy Mione and Pamela Martens, receive 1997 Women of Courage Awards from NOW President Patricia Ireland. Photo by Beth Corbin.