Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

Abstract

In 1974, nine of the country’s largest steel companies signed an agreement with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the United States Department of Labor and the United States Department of Justice. Among the concessions in this agreement, the mining companies agreed to provide a percentage of future jobs to women and minorities.

In 1975, four women walked into Eveleth Mines Forbes Fairlane Plant, in Northern Minnesota’s Mesabi Iron Range, as the first females to ever work in those mines. Among those first four was a 27 year old single mother named Lois Jenson. The men working in the mines took immediate opposition to women working alongside them and attempting to do work they felt was meant for men only.

In 1984, after enduring years of harassment, ridicule and degrading behavior from her male co-workers, Lois Jenson filed a complaint with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights. This began a legal and personal battle that developed into the first ever class action lawsuit involving sexual harassment and would eventually take 14 years to settle through the court system.

Jenson v. Eveleth Taconite Company is considered the first landmark case involving sexual harassment and set several important precedents for handling and dealing with sexual harassment in the workplace.

Jenson v. Eveleth Taconite Company

History and Facts

In 1974, the EEOC, the Department of Labor and the Department of Justice filed suit against the nation's nine largest steel producers for discriminatory hiring, promotion, assignment and wage policies directed against women and minorities. The government's suit also named the major steelworkers' union, the United Steelworkers of America, as a defendant. After five and a half months of negotiations, the government and the defendants resolve the dispute through a consent decree providing for approximately $31 million in back pay to be distributed to about 40,000 minority employees. The companies and the union also agreed to a set of goals which included hiring women and minority persons for half the openings in trade and craft jobs and for 25 percent of the vacancies in supervisory jobs. The decree also provides that seniority will now be determined on the basis of plant (rather than departmental) seniority permitting women and minority access to the better paying and more desirable jobs. (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 2013)

Eveleth, Minnesota is a low income area of Northern Minnesota about 200 miles north of Minneapolis-St. Paul. The steel mines provide most of the jobs in the area and being a miner in that area is a family legacy. In the early 1970s, Lois Jenson was a single mother of two who had bounced from job to job, all paying minimum