BREWERY
OTwo pics on this page! At top, the calendars found in one of the
Obuildings. At bottom, the cover of a manual on sexual harrassment.

from the
Yale Law Journal

In November 1991, several women who worked at a St. Paul, Minnesota bottling plant owned by Stroh's filed a lawsuit alleging a hostile work environment and denial of job advancement. Newcomers to the traditionally masculine preserve of beer making, the women were subjected to a series of severe acts of hostility. They were told that women could not hold certain jobs and that they should go home or get "women's jobs." They were referred to with demeaning epithets, like "bitch" and "squaw." They were physically assaulted in both sexual and nonsexual ways: One woman was "grabbed . . . on the rear end"; a male coworker "displayed his pubic hair [to a second woman] and grabbed [her] head and pushed it down to his crotch"; a male coworker drove a forklift toward another woman; a fourth woman "was given an extra-heavy workload after she injured her back and requested light duty, and was intentionally exposed by a fellow worker to toxic chemicals"; several other women had their tools and machines sabotaged and their tires slashed or deflated by male coworkers who "stop[ped] to taunt them with gutter talk or just to watch their misery" while they "g[o]t . . . down onto dirt, ice or slush to fix the tires." In addition, the women were subjected to a barrage of sexual comments, graffiti, and pin-ups of the sort often thrust upon women in blue- collar, male-dominated workplaces. At Stroh's, the campaign of harassment was both vicious and successful. Ultimately, it drove all the women plaintiffs away from the plant.