UCSF Office of Sexual Harassment Prevention & Resolution / Mitsubishi agrees to pay

The UCSF Office of Sexual Harassment Prevention and Resolution

MITSUBISHI AGREES TO PAY

Mitsubishi Motor Manufacturing of America, Inc. has agreed to pay a record $34 million dollars to settle the nation's largest sexual harassment lawsuit in history. More than 300 women brought the suit, claiming that they had been groped, grabbed, pressured for sex and threatened by co-workers and that the company did little to stop it.. They were offered an apology as well.

This is the second such lawsuit filed against Mitsubishi. Last year, they paid $10 million to settle a private lawsuit filed by 29 female employees who had similar complaints.

This was a major victory for the U.S. EEOC which filed the suit in 1996. "This should serve as a strong warning to employers and workers that sexual harassment will not be tolerated."

The reason the settlement took so long to negotiate was that Mitsubishi management didn't seem the magnitude of the problem. Abner Mikva, a former U.S. judge and White House counsel who mediated the suit claimed, "The executives thought the complaints were overblown. It's part of the "good-old-boys" reaction, like patting people on the fanny, that it's nothing to worry about."

To remedy the problem, training has been mandated as well as the creation of a three-person panel of outside monitors to ensure that sexual harassment policies are effective.

Plenty of American-based and European-based companies have sexual harassment problems. According to one EEOC official, Mitsubishi headquarters in Japan "didn't have the same degree of understanding" of the issue of sexual harassment like we have in the United States.

Excerpt from Mitsubishi Settles Suit for $34 million, in the San Francisco Chronicle, Friday, June 12, 1998.