Grace and Grit (26 page)

After the usual drawn-out back and forth at the beginning of each new witness’s testimony, Jon asked her what her understanding was concerning why she was graded lower than the men who worked alongside her.

“The way they put it,” Karen said, “I was not doing the job
100 percent of what they expected of me. And I was doing my job exactly like everybody else was. I was doing exactly what they told me to do.”

“And you were working the same as the men?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you reach an understanding why your evaluation was lower?”

“It just seemed that the women were, for some reason, rated lower than the men. They didn’t think they could do the job that men could do.”

After questioning Karen about her last raise, which she was given because her salary was “way below the level she was supposed to be at,” Jon produced an exhibit showing her what she’d never seen: her pay in comparison to that of the other, male managers. She made $2,728 a month, while the men’s monthly pay ranged from $3,960 to $4,662. I looked at the defense team and jury to measure their expression. It seemed everyone had been schooled in keeping a blank face.

“Did you know they were paid that much more than you?”

“You always hear rumors, and I’ve heard it out of several people’s mouths that they made quite a bit more than I did.”

As Jon read out each man’s pay in comparison with hers, he asked her what her understanding of this difference was.

Her final conclusion: “Just being a female in a man’s world.”

“Did you ever complain you were being paid less because of your gender?”

“No, sir, I didn’t complain, because I was a single mother with a handicapped child, and I knew my job would be in jeopardy if I started complaining about the pay.”

W
HEN
S
HARON
testified next, I had a hard time watching. I could tell she was nervous. She’d had a tough time, losing so much weight that she looked downright pitiful; it broke my heart.

Sharon recounted what she’d told me while we’d worked together in the office for a short while. She’d been hired in 1971, and being a single mother, she had to quit her position as a night supervisor when the woman who cared for her child died. She became a supervisor again in the 1990s and was promised a pay raise. After asking twice about the promised raise, she returned to being a secretary when she was told again the third time she inquired that they were still working on it. When she said she was returning to her job as a secretary, she was informed that the best that could be done was a 20 percent increase in her salary. Jon also introduced to the jury the EEOC charge she had recently filed for pay discrimination.

During Sharon’s testimony, she hesitated once or twice, focusing her gaze on the back of the courtroom. She was distracted by the crowd of Goodyear workers, all men, and many of them my former coworkers, taking turns peering through the windows of the courtroom doors. One after another, their faces would appear in the doorway—reminding me of the circus act where clowns keep tumbling out of a small car. They also filled the hallway, sitting on the benches and milling around in groups.

On a break that first day, Sharon had told me what she’d overheard in the hall as she walked past the gang. Apparently, when one of the guys asked Matt why he was there, he shrugged and grinned underneath his blond handlebar mustache, saying, “Hell, I don’t know. Goodyear just called and said get your ass dressed and get down to the courthouse.”

When I saw Matt in the hall later, the first thought that came to my mind was how, during his shift, he used to like to hop Goodyear’s steel fence to go into town and drink at a local restaurant until it was time to hop back over and punch out. On the weekends, he and some of the guys hunted and fished together in a club Goodyear sponsored for its employees, so we called them “the hunting and fishing club.” Neither Matt’s attitude nor his comment
surprised me or Sharon, who knew the club’s sorry ways better than anyone.

I figured she was agitated by the fact that she would face these same men at work when the trial ended. I hated to think about the price she’d have to pay for speaking out.

W
HEN
J
ON
sat down, Mr. St. Clair took immediate aim at Sharon, asking about her lower pay: “What makes you think that had anything to do with the fact that you’re a woman?”

Sharon didn’t miss a beat. There was no other male area manager who was making the small amount of money she was—her secretary’s salary—but her supervisor expected her to accept this pay difference without question.

A
FTER LUNCH
Mike called to the stand Janet Essix, the paralegal who calculated my back pay, to outline how back pay worked. The back-pay claim fell under the pay-discrimination claim related to the involuntary transfer—we were attempting to determine how much I would have made had I not been transferred and stayed in my position as area manager to that day. Back pay is calculated according to standards created by the National Labor Relations Board, Janet explained. Her calculation reflected my rate of pay from when I retired to the present day, January 21, 2003.

Mike displayed the exhibit, which told the additional amount I would have made had I continued working as an area manager (excluding overtime): $236,791.72.

Mike compared my pay, which according to the law could only be two years prior to when I filed the EEOC charge, which was March 25, 1996, to that of another area manager who was similar in ranking to me, showing on a pay chart the difference between our salaries.

“What is the difference in their pay?” Mike asked.

“$328,597.93.”

The next exhibit showed the back pay if I were to have received the same pay as the young man who replaced me as an area manager: $321,453.03.

The back pay for another area manager who retired at the same time I did and was recalled to work was $344,153.54.

The white chart, with its black-and-white numbers showing stark differences, spoke for itself. There wasn’t much Mr. St. Clair could say except that I’d received a lump sum and retirement benefits when I retired,
which weren’t reflected in the calculations and were long gone
, I thought to myself. It was also noted that if I received back pay, I’d have to pay back my retirement.

On redirect, Mike propped on the easel a chart highlighting the glaring contrast between the actual earnings of three area managers compared with what I’d have been earning if I’d continued in the technology engineer position from 1998 to the present.

The most dramatic chart was the comparison in pay between me and six other area managers. They were making $59,028, $55,679, $57,696, $58,226, and $58,464, when I was making only $44,724.

W
ITH THE
differences in numbers fresh in everyone’s minds, the defense took its turn to present its witnesses. Paul, a business-center manager and my supervisor for a month when I was in the ARF section in 1997, had flown all the way from the Goodyear operations in Brazil. He went first, probably because Jon had not had a chance to depose him during the discovery.

Mr. St. Clair submitted my 1997 performance evaluation so Paul could explain that evaluations were based on scorecards, which combined managers’ audits and observations. Paul elaborated on the spreadsheet he’d created to rank all of the managers, weighting each person differently according to the complexity of the job. When he’d taken all of my performance data and fed it into the computer, I was “tied for worst” because I needed better
results from my crew, didn’t attend safety meetings, and didn’t hold team meetings, he claimed. Mr. St. Clair lingered in great detail on each of these points, while Paul commented that I didn’t protest his criticisms, except the one about not holding team meetings due to overtime being frozen—these meetings were always held in the morning after the night shift, and my guys had to be paid overtime to attend them. But I had protested every wrong thing he had said about my performance.

If I thought I’d been uncomfortable listening to Mr. St. Clair try to portray me as an emotionally unstable liar, it was even harder to hear him paint me as such a poor performer. I guess if you give a company twenty of the best years of your life, that’s a hard pill to swallow.

Mr. St. Clair made Paul read from his notes on my evaluation. I’d said my new job as a technology engineer was “great and a better fit” when Paul had asked me about it in our conversation. I hoped the jury would have sense enough to understand that I was trying to remain nonconfrontational during that meeting. What good would it have done at that time to tell him that I was miserable?

Paul concluded with his thoughts about my being a technical engineer: “It was a better job for Lilly because she was better at managing herself.”

Sure, moving two hundred 80-pound tires daily was a better fit for me than managing people.

D
URING CROSS-EXAMINATION
, Jon immediately jumped to the heart of the matter by asking for the original documents and audits with the actual production numbers used to feed the data into the computer in the first place. Paul couldn’t tell him where they were.

Jon turned to face the jury at the end of his question before he continued in this same vein.

It’s a law that when an EEOC charge is filed, a company has to retain all of its records. By September, when Goodyear was notified of the charge and the EEOC inquired about personnel records, the documents were already missing. If Goodyear wanted to prove how bad my performance was, then the actual production numbers could verify it. The original documents disappeared, Jon argued, because they didn’t support Goodyear’s case. And as Jon later discovered when questioning Paul, the process by which Paul weighted the evaluation wasn’t an objective, computer-generated score; it was a subjective evaluation.

To add to the mix, Eddie had shared with Paul his performance notes from the prior year. Paul insisted that these negative notes were not taken into account for my evaluation, and that he did not keep them. But they were not among the documents that Goodyear turned over to Jon during the discovery phase. Jon also pointed out that Paul had kept his own detailed notes about my performance behavior based on our discussions, conversations Paul had commented were like “a counseling session.” Paul could not recall having those same sessions with anyone else.

Jon brought forth the evaluation ranking that put me next to the bottom with one underneath; the man underneath me earned significantly more than I did. He paused for a long moment before he asked, “Who are the two lowest-paid on the list?”

The answer: the only two women on the list, Sharon and me.

For the first time, I felt the tide was turning a bit. With the women’s testimony, the drastic differences in pay, and the missing
documents, the facts were building to create an accurate picture of Goodyear.

M
Y HEART
started beating faster when Eddie took the stand. Mike started out easy, addressing the memo Eddie distributed to “Boys,” which I had deemed sexist. Eddie tried to pass this off as humor, though his tone toward me had never been lighthearted. My shoulders tensed hearing his version of events, especially when he couldn’t recall that I’d been given the Top Performance Award. His testimony was what I’d dreaded about going to trial, knowing how smooth and convincing he could be to people who didn’t know him like I did. I wasn’t surprised when he denied calling me a troublemaker and telling me to retire.

Just the sound of his voice evoked the familiar feelings of frustration and fear I’d lived with daily at Goodyear, and everything around me in the courtroom created heightened sensations. The sounds of Jon’s pen scribbling furiously on his legal pad, light scratches similar to a mouse skittering inside the walls at night, unsettled me. I was distracted when he occasionally leaned over to whisper something important to Mike, who’d propped his elbows on the table and rested his chin on his folded hands, while his focus never left Mr. St. Clair’s questioning.

I remembered how angry Eddie had become that last year when I’d questioned him about my treatment and later my transfer. Eddie had never forgiven me for enduring so long when he believed I didn’t belong there in the first place, and as Goodyear’s efforts to get rid of me once and for all escalated those last two years, Eddie had gladly helped deliver the last blows.

In the following testimony my attorneys brought up many issues surrounding the Top Performance Award and questioned why I received a merit award if I was such a poor performer. Eric, who had given me the award, struggled to explain this. In a faltering
voice he surmised why the original documents to support my poor ranking were missing: They were thrown away because everyone thought the plant was closing and the offices were cleaned out to sell the furnishings. But why, then, were the only copies salvaged from the discarded file cabinets the ones supporting Goodyear’s side?

Not only that. How twisted, then, was it for Eric to award me the largest raise I’d received since the merit-based program was enacted when I was such a bad employee? To answer that, Eric began by saying that I was a hard worker and dependable, and I worked well with people. His tone changed abruptly, as if he realized he’d made a mistake by telling the truth, and he started talking about my performance not being up to standards.

Strangely, Eric’s memory began to fail him, and he couldn’t recall what he’d told me when he gave me the award. But his words just didn’t add up. I had an unimpressive record, yet he awarded me raises three years in a row, adding the Top Performance Award the last year, not for superior performance but “to make sure Lilly was not at the bottom of the pay range or under the minimum.”