More Than A Tune-Up

THE WOMAN WE'LL CALL AMY GOT the picture soon after she took a job at the Mitsubishi plant several months ago. She'd heard all the accusations of sexual harassment--lewd comments, explicit photos, groping of women on the assembly line--at the Normal, Ill., auto factory. But after three years of lawsuits and bad publicity at Mitsubishi, she figured that that stuff was ancient history. She learned otherwise. One worker asked her to tuck in her shirt ""so I can see your ass.'' Another told her, on a daily basis, ""I want to stick you.'' Then there was the guy who asked her to pick up a battery bracket. When she did, he told her, ""I just wanted you to bend over the car so I could do you like a man.'' After Amy reported the men to Mitsubishi, a male co-worker who was close to her harassers warned her that the guys had told him they ""won't hold anything back.'' If push came to shove, he said, they would invent stories about her own sexual exploits to take the heat off themselves.

Turning around one of the most infamous workplaces in the United States is proving to be harder than anyone expected. A NEWSWEEK investigation suggests that the company has made more serious reforms than its critics might expect. Mitsubishi hired Lynn Martin, former labor secretary to George Bush, to propose reforms for the plant. Both the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the news media have treated that move as window dressing. NEWSWEEK'S reporting--including unprecedented access to the workings of Martin's task force--suggests that it has been anything but. Mitsubishi's policies on sexual harassment are now far more stringent than those of most Fortune 500 companies. The company launched a host of detailed training and management reforms and fired 16 flagrant offenders.

But stopping the public humiliation of women by groups of men, it turns out, was the easy part. The efforts have driven harassment into the shadows, where some men continue to deliver their insults in a one-on-one fashion that many women find even more menacing. ""Guys used to yell across the work area, "Nice tits!' '' says ""Denise,'' who can't afford to quit her $50,000-a-year job. ""Now they come over and say it to your face.'' The mutating of harassment at Mitsubishi into subtler forms leaves the company with a far tougher task. Bosses can't observe and stamp out secretive mistreatment. Instead Mitsubishi must transform its culture to turn itself into the kind of workplace where such things don't occur.

Chances are you've heard about the Mitsubishi plant only because of two lawsuits filed on behalf of women workers. Three months ago Mitsubishi agreed to pay $9.5 million to 27 women who had filed a harassment suit in 1994. The federal EEOC is still pressing a second suit for some 300 women at the plant. In September the EEOC charged that between 1988 and 1993 Mitsubishi had tolerated boorish, even terrifying behavior by some 400 men who resented the women's presence. Men allegedly used air guns to shoot painful blasts at women's chests and crotches. Others frequently grabbed women by their breasts, simulated masturbation or exposed themselves. One worker allegedly forced a woman's legs apart and threatened to sodomize her. The EEOC said the company had ""discouraged complaints and permitted retaliation against women who dared to complain.'' Among the most chilling allegations: as supervisors idly listened, one man said he would force a woman to have sex with him--before he killed her. Mitsubishi denies fostering a climate of abuse. But the company does not deny that serious harassment occurred.

Mitsubishi's initial efforts to address the problem were ham-handed: after the EEOC filed its suit last year, Mitsubishi bused about 3,000 employees to an orchestrated protest outside the agency's office in downtown Chicago. That only added to the perception that Mitsubishi didn't care. Three weeks later, Mitsubishi wised up and hired Martin.

What her team found was a deeply troubled corporate culture whose ills went well beyond harassment. The company's sole focus was on cars, with scant attention to the people who built them. The plant was a technological marvel that had stuffed crucial workplace issues into the closet. The personnel department was an understaffed shell with little access to Mitsubishi's top brass. Training to combat sexual harassment was clearly inadequate--but so was the training in a whole range of supervisory skills, such as preparing new managers for the factory floor. Martin's first move, NEWSWEEK has learned, was to demand not just oversight of Mitsubishi's harassment policies but also of an ambitious plan for a host of worker-friendly changes.