BY ILONA GERSH  
DETROIT--This is the story of Lois Jenson, an iron ore miner in Minnesota who filed a class-action lawsuit in 1988 against Eveleth Mines for sexual harassment. This book is well worth reading: it details the acts of verbal and physical abuse that Jenson and other workers faced on the job because they were women, and her fight to make the company pay a price for the treatment they received. Her victory 11 years later served as legal precedent for the well-publicized 1999 lawsuit against sexual harassment by auto assembly-line workers against Mitsubishi.

Jenson was the fifth woman hired by Eveleth Mines on the Mesabi Iron Range in northern Minnesota. In many ways, she was typical of the first women miners on the Iron Range. When she hired on in 1975, she was 27, a single mother, and had worked low-paying jobs as a bank teller, a file clerk, and a secretary. Although it had never occurred to her to work as a miner before, she saw no reason why she couldn’t do the work, and the pay for this union job was the best in the area.

The Mesabi Iron Range is a 110-mile string of small towns built at the turn of the century along a large seam of iron ore called taconite. Eveleth Mines was opened by the Ford Motor Company in 1966 during a boom in the economy.

The workers at the taconite mines are organized by the United Steelworkers of America (USWA). Women first joined the USWA by getting jobs during World War II in the steel mills. The union, by winning an affirmative action agreement in the form of a 1974 "consent decree" between the federal government, nine of the country’s largest steel companies, and the USWA, opened the door further to women seeking better-paying industrial jobs. First, the mines owned by steel giants such as U.S. Steel, National Steel, and Republic Steel started to hire women. Later other mines like Eveleth Mines followed suit.

Industrial growth made it easier for a substantial number of women to get into the mines through the consent decree. Between 1974 and 1976 the Eveleth Mines Company hired 639 young miners. By 1977, two years after Jenson started work, there were 33 women working at Eveleth Mines.

The first mine to hire women in 1974 was U.S. Steel-owned Minntac, the largest of the mines on the Range. I was hired there four years later at the beginning of a hiring wave that brought the workforce to more than 2,000. Two hundred of the new hires were women.

Class Action effectively describes the abusive conditions women faced in the mines and Lois Jenson’s struggle against them. Readers will learn a lot from her account, but the book doesn’t tell the whole story. Moreover, the authors’ description of the Iron Range as "Minnesota’s pocket of social conservatism" is wrong; it echoes the kind of skewed view of reality that is often presented by people who have not been part of the life and struggles of the working class on the Range.

The experience of other women miners at Minntac, including myself, is different. While it wasn’t easy for women who broke into the mines in those years, the solidarity we received from our union brothers at Minntac made a big difference. The prize we won by fighting for our rights was the kind of political confidence and self-respect that can’t easily be taken away.

I began work after a victorious 138-day strike in 1977 that won major demands at all the mines. USWA Local 1938 at Minntac was at the center of the strike, and afterward the miners continued to take steps forward to defend themselves. One such action was the union leadership’s decision to ask several women to set up a women’s committee of the union to address specific problems that women miners faced on the job. These included inadequate change and shower facilities, the tracking of women into the lowest-paying jobs, supervisors who tried to drive women out during our 90-day probation, and an atmosphere fostered by the company that encouraged sexual harassment.

The USWA Local 1938 Women’s Committee held meetings every two weeks that were sometimes attended by 100 to 150 people. Besides taking on issues we faced on the job, we decided to bring broader women’s rights issues into the union. In March 1979 the union endorsed an abortion rights protest held in Virginia, Minnesota, and men as well as women from our union carried signs and a banner at the protest. A handful of right-wingers in the union tried several times to reverse the decision to support a woman’s right to choose, saying it wasn’t an appropriate issue for the unions. But they were soundly defeated each time. We argued that the union as a whole has to take up issues like abortion rights because they are important to all working people.

After the first woman miner was killed on the job in a pit labor gang accident, the women’s committee held an emergency meeting to discuss how to respond to the argument we knew would come: women shouldn’t work in the mines because it’s too dangerous. We said that if it’s too dangerous for us, it was also too dangerous for men. The union should fight for stronger safety regulations to protect us all.

The pit was the stage for the first fight at Minntac against discrimination. In 1975 the company tried to segregate some of the first women miners into an all-female track gang where they were paid the lowest pay rate and had no hope of bidding for better jobs. Karen Hill, who was one of the first women to work in the open pit mines on the Range, filed a sex discrimination suit challenging the company. She won broad support and forced U.S. Steel to end the segregated crews.

Protests around many political issues also took place on the Range. When the federal government instituted mandatory registration for the military draft in 1980 and intensified its military campaign to crush the Nicaraguan revolution and revolutionary struggles in other Central American countries in the early 1980s, hundreds joined in protests on the Range together with other demonstrations across the country.

Interest in such issues, along with respect for the Militant’s accurate and consistent coverage of the 1977 strike, led more than 100 working people on the Iron Range to subscribe to the socialist weekly paper during the strike.

The officialdom of USWA Local 6860, which organized workers at Eveleth Mines, rejected Lois Jenson’s proposal to set up a union women’s committee to confront the conditions she and other workers faced on the job. But she was a fighter, always looking for ways to link up with others. Once she came to the Local 1938 women’s committee for support, when she was searching for a way to win over the union leadership in her local. While she waited for the courts to rule on her case, Jenson reached out to anyone who would listen to her story, including a conference of women coal miners held in 1997 in Edmonton, Canada.

Without her union’s support, however, she was weaker than we were at Minntac, where we had the backing of our union. The lawsuit was her last resort. She had to live through 25 years of mental and physical harassment before she finally won, but her victory strengthened the confidence and spirit of women at Eveleth Mines, and gained the solidarity of a layer of men there as well.  
 
 
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