By admin 
Trenton Engine is one of the largest machine-tool factories in the world—a three-square-block complex south of Detroit that employs thirty-five hundred workers and builds the engines for most Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, and Eagle products. The Trenton assembly line operates twenty-four hours a day, in three shifts, and life there, dominated by the United Auto Workers, is rigidly hierarchical—based on union job classification and seniority. The U.A.W. leadership has historically embraced social change, notably during the civil-rights struggles of the sixties, but the rank and file have traditionally been socially conservative, suspicious, even hostile, toward blacks, war protesters, women—anyone thought of as different—and that conflict has often been played out on the factory floor.
Read more Parade
Though memories of the harsh recession of the early eighties remain vivid, the years since have been boom times for Chrysler and its hundred and twenty-six thousand employees. After Ron Woods reported for work there as an electrician, in 1987, he was often able to work seven days a week, twelve hours a day. During one stint in 1989, Woods worked eighty-three days straight. That year, he earned fifty-five thousand dollars, at $14.82 an hour. The job enabled him to replace his aging Renault Alliance with a new Chrysler New Yorker and, in 1990, to make a down payment on a house.
Woods, who is now thirty-seven, is clean-cut and trim—about five feet nine and a hundred and thirty-five pounds—and he says his size distinguishes him from many of his more burly colleagues on the factory floor. He has two junior-college degrees—one in commerce and one in electronics—and these also set him apart from most of his co-workers, for whom high-school diplomas are the rule. From the day Woods arrived at Chrysler, he tried his best to fit in. From time to time, he bought dough-nuts for his co-workers on the way to his shift, which began at midnight. When he completed his first ninety days with the company—a probationary period that earned him job security under the union contract—he celebrated by buying pizza for his unit. The pepperoni spelled out “THANKS GUYS.” A co-worker, a twenty-one-year Chrysler veteran, pulled him aside and said, “I don’t know how you’ve done it, but everybody likes you, and that ain’t easy here.” Woods was eager to please his superiors, and he earned a string of sterling job-performance evaluations, which he has proudly saved.
But for all his friendliness Woods evaded personal questions. “You laugh at the queerest things,” a co-worker once observed, and the reference to “queer” in the otherwise innocuous comment made Woods nervous. There was no doubt in Woods’s mind that anyone who was gay would be ostracized. There had been an uproar at the plant when a forklift operator had a sex-change operation, and then began to use the women’s bathroom. (She was relegated to another women’s bathroom, used by office workers.) Another co-worker was attacked and beaten one night after leaving a gay bar. When the man returned to work after being hospitalized for reconstructive surgery, Woods overheard comments like “He would have been better off if he died.”
The first time Woods asked for a week’s vacation, he explained that his girlfriend had won a trip to the Bahamas. “Way to go, take the time off,” his supervisor said, slapping him on the back. In truth, it was a man he met at a gay bar who had invited him on the trip.
As months passed and his fictitious girlfriend never materialized, Woods could sense a subtle shift in attitude. Co-workers grew more distant. Then, in April, 1990, after three years at the plant, Woods spent hours one hot day finding and installing a part needed to get one of the assembly lines back in operation. Afterward, Woods recalls, he sought refuge from the heat in the air-conditioned office of the foreman, Tony Neubecker, where he and Neubecker were joined by Mack MacDonald, a toolmaker on the line. Neubecker weighs more than three hundred pounds, and MacDonald weighs about two hundred and ninety. “What took you so long?” MacDonald asked, in an angry tone. “What kind of electrician are you?”
Woods was bewildered. “I couldn’t find a part,” he stammered, but MacDonald kept badgering him. Woods looked to Neubecker for support, then said, “Why don’t you leave me alone?”
With that, MacDonald jumped up from his chair and backhanded Woods hard across the face.
Woods was stunned, angry. “Did you hit me?”
“If I wanted to hit you, you’d be dead,” MacDonald replied, according to a grievance Woods later filed detailing the incident. “I can take you outside this office, bend you over, and fuck you in the ass if I want. Or I can wait for you after work and fuck you up.”
Woods turned to the foreman. “Could you call security?”
“You don’t tell me what to do,” Neubecker replied.
“You saw him attack me and you won’t call?” Woods asked, incredulous.
“I didn’t see anything.”
MacDonald has disputed Woods’s account, but also agreed to leave him alone. Since then, Woods says, he has been physically attacked four times, received threats on his life, endured countless taunts and insults, and had to be transferred from Trenton Engine on account of increasing hostility. He is still employed by Chrysler—in the company’s Technology Center, at corporate headquarters, in Auburn Hills, Michigan—but the experience has transformed him from passive conformist to determined reformer to angry activist. He is now doing something that no one has done before: leading a crusade to secure job protection for gay employees at Chrysler. In that way, he is in the vanguard of a remarkable emergence of gay people within the auto industry. He has picketed Chrysler’s headquarters, blitzed its chairman, Robert J. Eaton, with letters and complaints, and founded an organization called the Campaign for Equal Rights at Chrysler, which this past May picketed Chrysler’s annual shareholders’ meeting, in Seattle. His most notable success has been advocating his cause within the United Auto Workers. Last spring, Woods delivered a rousing address against job discrimination at the union’s triennial bargaining convention, and succeeded in adding protection against job discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation to the union’s final contract-negotiating planks.
Ron Woods’s visibility, if not always his confrontational tactics, has encouraged others. Chrysler now has another gay employees’ organization, People of Diversity. Composed mostly of non-union, managerial employees, it was modelled on a similar organization that had been formed recently at Ford. Perhaps most startling was the decision of a much admired vice-chairman of Ford, Allan Gilmour, to disclose his homosexuality in an interview last winter with Between the Lines, a Detroit monthly. Gilmour had already retired from Ford, but continues to serve on the boards of five major corporations.
Many people in Detroit are astounded that gay ferment has reached the auto industry. Car and truck manufacturing is “probably the most conservative industry in the country,” says Jeff Montgomery, whose father, a Chrysler executive, warned him that being gay could ruin his career. Montgomery heads the Triangle Foundation, a lesbian-and-gay civil-rights group in Michigan. Phill O’Jibway, who is the managing editor of Cruise, a Detroit-area gay-and-lesbian weekly, says, “I’m astonished that any of this is happening in Michigan. I thought this would be the last place on earth. I grew up here. . . . It has a lot to do with the conformist corporate culture that this area is famous for, as well as the heavily blue-collar conformist culture.”
Nevertheless, most gay and lesbian autoworkers remain in the closet, for fear of discrimination and even violence on the factory floor, if not in executive suites. Michigan is one of thirty-nine states with no job protection for gays and lesbians; federal legislation to extend job protection to gays and lesbians failed in the Senate last year by a single vote. Despite Woods’s success in obtaining union support, Chrysler refused to include sexual orientation as a protected category in a new three-year contract it entered into with the U.A.W. last year, and the U.A.W. capitulated. Though People of Diversity has adopted a policy of non-confrontation, Chrysler has yet to sanction the group as an official employee organization—a sanction that would entitle members to meet on company property and use company resources such as bulletin boards. (Its counterpart at Ford has company sanction.)
Even as Chrysler earlier this year issued several statements pledging non-discrimination, the company got caught up in two public controversies that brought into question the company’s stance. Esquire cancelled publication of a short story by David Leavitt planned for the April issue—a story that contained explicit gay material—after its publisher warned the editor that Chrysler would withdraw its advertising. In March, Chrysler cancelled its previously scheduled advertising on an episode of the ABC series “Ellen” in which the main character would reveal that she is a lesbian.
As the fourth-largest advertiser in the country, Chrysler is highly visible, and its status as a major consumer-products firm makes it especially averse to controversy that might trigger the kind of boycott recently proclaimed by the Southern Baptist Convention against the Walt Disney Company, because of the company’s perceived support for gay and lesbian employees. (Disney owns ABC, the network that airs “Ellen.”) In addition, many Chrysler executives are simply squeamish when it comes to homosexuality, a topic that remains off limits in polite Midwestern society, and thus they were unprepared for the idea that gay-rights advocates would prove to be as zealous and well organized as the religious right.
Based on his experience at Ford and as a corporate director, Gilmour says that in most old-line, conservative industrial companies, homosexuality “is an issue that is never brought up.” By contrast, many high-technology, media, and entertainment concerns have prohibited discrimination against gays and lesbians for years; I.B.M. has had such a policy since 1974. Of Ford, Gilmour said, “If I’d taken a poll of key people, many of them would have been very uncomfortable about homosexuality, the subject in general. They would wish the subject would disappear.”
Last month, I flew to Detroit, rented a black Dodge Intrepid, and visited Woods at his home, in Huntington Woods, an attractive Detroit suburb known for its large Jewish population and tolerant attitudes. His house is a pleasant split-level just across the street from a public golf course. In the front yard was planted a large sign saying “No News or Free Press Wanted Here”—a reference to union trouble at Detroit’s major newspapers. Woods was quick to volunteer that he had dreamed all his life of living in a house this nice, and was grateful to Chrysler and his union for making it possible.
Beneath his polite and somewhat self-deprecating manner, I sensed both anger and determination—and growing despair. Woods is someone whose efforts have already produced remarkable results in the auto industry, but he is not simply a gay version of Norma Rae, the heroic textile-industry-union activist portrayed onscreen by Sally Field. In recent months, his continuing complaints of gay bias have cost him the support even of his most loyal friends at work, who charge that Woods is using his sexual orientation to demand, and get, preferential treatment. Once seen as a rising star within the U.A.W., he has now lost the support of his union local. Just before I arrived, he told me, he had received a letter informing him that his union membership had been suspended for two years. “My being gay makes regular guys insane,” he says. “I don’t know why. I was being backstabbed constantly. A co-worker finally pulled me aside. ‘Don’t you understand? Everything you do is wrong. People talk about you all the time. They give me a hard time for working with you. You have no support.’ ”
Woods at first had tried to ignore the antipathy he felt, but he could not forget the incident with MacDonald in the foreman’s office. In June of that year, Woods took a rare weekend off. He invited his parents, recently retired, to visit him in his new house, and he planned to attend a Gay Pride celebration. Woods had never told his parents that he was gay, and when he blurted it out to his mother she burst into tears. “Promise me you’ll never tell your father,” she said. Woods was upset by her response, but he agreed. Despite his mother’s reaction, Woods participated in the Gay Pride event.
Then, a few months later, he read in the newspaper that Cracker Barrel, a Tennessee-based restaurant chain, was opening a branch in the Detroit area. It was also firing gay and lesbian employees for failing to “demonstrate normal heterosexual values,” according to a company memo (a policy it has since reversed). Woods was furious. “I said, ‘Oh, yeah?’ This is U.A.W. country, this is workplace-rights country.” Eager to participate in some kind of protest, he started making the rounds of the few gay and lesbian organizations active in the Detroit area at the time. Nothing had been planned, and no one seemed interested in making any visible move. The vice-president of the Detroit Area Gay and Lesbian Council, Woods learned, was still in the closet; one of its board members, an executive with thirty-five years at General Motors, used a pseudonym in making any statement related to the gay organization.
So Woods organized a protest on his own. He persuaded a gay-and-lesbian restaurant to provide meeting space. He got Cruise to advertise organizational meetings. He handed out thousands of flyers at gay bars. The day of the grand opening of Cracker Barrel, Woods walked into the Trenton Engine plant and saw his picture in someone’s Detroit Free Press along with an article about the protest, to be held that afternoon. He felt “elated, but it was scary,” he said. “I was worried about what could happen to me at Chrysler.” Job security was Woods’s main anxiety. When he was a freshman at Michigan State University, his father’s business had collapsed. Woods dropped out of school and, with his parents, moved into a mobile home.
As Woods walked through the plant, he saw numerous copies of the paper, but no one called out to him. In the employee staging area, he saw a fellow-electrician, Jim Sloan, reading the article. Sloan looked at it, he looked at Woods, he looked down at the article again. “Ron,” he finally asked, “did you know your picture and name would be in the paper?”
“Yeah,” Woods said. When Sloan didn’t reply, Woods added, “Thanks for mentioning it.” Sloan said nothing further.
At the grand opening of Cracker Barrel, a hundred and twenty-five protesters showed up, Woods prominent among them. He carried an American flag and a sign saying “Unfair to Labor.” Local reporters and photographers covered the event. The next day, when Woods arrived at work, a large poster had been taped up above his usual chair. It showed a muscular man—Woods thinks it may have been a Calvin Klein model—wearing nothing but bikini briefs. Not long after that, a pipe fitter tried to pick a fight with Woods on the factory floor. Work rules on the floor, encrusted by years of ritual and collective-bargaining restrictions, provided ample opportunity for disputes, and now Woods seemed constantly embroiled in them.
About seven months after his picture appeared in the paper, a janitor, Robert Thompson, threw a pail of water over Woods’s feet while he was sitting in the staging area reading a newspaper. “Get out of here,” Thompson said, preparing to mop the floor.
Woods complied, but later, when he returned to his seat, he said to Thompson, “Is there any way you could be a little more polite?”
“I don’t have to be,” Thompson replied.
“No, but you could be,” Woods said.
With that, Thompson, who was about Woods’s height but much stockier, grabbed Woods by the neck, as if he were trying to strangle him, and then threw him backward. Woods interviewed a couple of the witnesses to the incident, including his fellow-electrician Jim Sloan, and they said they would give statements supporting Woods to labor relations. Still angry, he reported the incident to the local police when his shift ended. The police report was picked up in a local newspaper, but the paper didn’t mention Woods by name. “A 32-year-old Huntington Woods man walked into the Police Station on Wednesday afternoon and said he had been assaulted that morning,” the story began. The next day, when Woods arrived at the staging area, someone had posted the news report. Scrawled above it were the words “Ron Woods, faggot.”
No action was taken against Thompson. When questioned by union representatives, the witnesses to the event, including Sloan, said they hadn’t seen anything. Woods says he approached Sloan, whom he considered as much of a friend as anyone involved, and asked him as politely as possible why he hadn’t been willing to say anything. “Ron,” Sloan replied, “what do you expect when you stand up for a bunch of queers?”
Woods had never been taunted at school or in previous jobs. He says he was psychologically unprepared for what now seemed like an unrelenting stream of abuse, and he sought psychiatric treatment for depression at the Henry Ford Medical Center. In a report to Chrysler’s workers’ compensation department, Woods’s doctor and social worker there stated that after rumors spread that Woods was homosexual “it appears that Mr. Woods began to be the object of harassment by many co-workers,” which ranged in form from “lack of support from management to outright physical violence and threats of severe violence.” They found Woods to be “stressed and distraught,” and concluded that his condition was “likely” to be related to his employment.
Woods approached his union representative to file a formal grievance detailing various incidents. Woods’s union committeeman, Mike Harrald, one of about ten black union members in Woods’s unit, was one of the few who seemed sympathetic. He said, “Ron, ninety-seven per cent of the men I represent are white. I’m black. I know about bigotry.” He filed the grievance on Woods’s behalf.
Before it could be acted upon, however, Harrald concluded that it was unsafe for Woods to keep working at Trenton Engine, and in August, 1992, he was transferred to the Technology Center in Auburn Hills. Woods says he approached a few people at Trenton to say goodbye. “People were cold and distant,” he recalls. “I had a small list I wanted to say goodbye to, but the first two didn’t seem to care, so I left.” As he was walking out, two millwrights drove by on a cart and yelled “Asshole.”
Chrysler’s corporate headquarters was a different world from Trenton, one dominated by managerial, white-collar workers rather than by the assembly line. Woods’s work shifted from production to construction and repair; additions and renovations at the complex were constant. In general, levels of education were higher, and co-workers were more sophisticated.
Unbeknownst to Woods, though, virtually everyone at his new job had already heard he was gay, and that disclosure had triggered a wave of revulsion. A fellow-electrician, Bill Witmer, recalls being told even before Woods arrived that he was gay and being advised not to work with him. Of many fellow-workers, Witmer says, “They’re one step from the Klan, if not in the Klan. They’re hostile, very against gays. People went crazy over this.” In 1993, the Secret Service was called in to Chrysler’s corporate headquarters after a worker there threatened to kill President Clinton if he followed through on his promise to permit gays in the military.
Initially, Woods was shunned. Suspecting that a picture of the Cracker Barrel protest which had run in Solidarity, the U.A.W. magazine, had tipped off his co-workers, he spoke to the editors there about his plight. The conversation led to an article on Woods in the January/February, 1993, issue, which identified Woods as gay and praised his efforts to fight discrimination. “We were trying to say that what was happening to Ron was wrong,” says Michael Funke, the Solidarity reporter who wrote the article.
Witmer, for one, was gradually won over. “I never worked with anyone gay or homosexual,” Witmer says. Though he’s married and has four children, he says he could empathize with Woods’s plight, because he often felt singled out owing to his height, six feet ten, and his weight, three hundred and fifty. “You feel like an outsider except in a basketball game,” he says. Another convert was a newly hired electrician named Terry Kremkow, who was assigned to be Woods’s partner after everyone else refused to work with him. Kremkow recalls that his supervisor warned him Woods was gay and apologized for the assignment. “Is he like a Jehovah’s Witness?” Kremkow asked, referring to the religious denomination’s aggressive proselytizing efforts. “Then I’ll have a problem. If not, I couldn’t care less.” Their friendship even reached the point where Kremkow joked, “If I see a good-looking guy, I’ll let you know.” Kremkow told other workers that Woods’s personal life “doesn’t matter,” and said, “We’re here to build cars.”
This sort of tolerance was slow to spread among Woods’s co-workers. One afternoon when Kremkow came into the lunchroom, he was confronted by Malen Marcum, an air-conditioning repairman and former head of the union in Woods’s work unit. “How are you and your little faggot buddy Ron Woods?” Marcum asked in a loud voice, which brought conversation in the room to a stop. “Has he given you head lately?” A fight between the three-hundred-pound Marcum, who rides a Harley-Davidson and wears steel-toed boots, and Kremkow, a serious bodybuilder, seemed imminent, but Kremkow defused the situation by saying, “You’re the one with the earring and the ponytail.”
Kremkow’s car was vandalized in the Chrysler parking lot on a number of occasions. After work one day, Marcum tried to kick Witmer in the groin, leaving bruises on Witmer’s leg. Witmer filed a police complaint over the incident, and Marcum later pleaded no contest to assault and battery. He was suspended by Chrysler for six months without pay.
While Marcum acknowledges feeling hostility toward Woods and his allies, and concedes that he may have taunted them, he says the rancor had more to do with their being electricians who, he contends, were stealing overtime work from air-conditioning people like himself than with Woods’s being gay. He denies beating Witmer, but acknowledges pleading no contest and being suspended because Chrysler didn’t believe his version.
Anti-gay sentiment wasn’t confined to hourly workers. One of Woods’s supervisors, Michael Conlon, who was in charge of handing out work assignments, mocked Woods to his co-workers with limp-wristed gestures. According to Woods, another supervisor, Mark Hardy, often criticized Woods’s work, made threatening gestures, and was overheard by another worker denouncing Woods’s gay activism. As his union steward, Kremkow filed a grievance against Hardy on Woods’s behalf, and Woods was transferred, unwillingly, to another work area. As a result of a subsequent incident, Hardy and Woods were instructed not to speak to each other.
Woods says that he tried to ignore all this and do his job, but that he worried about other gay employees suffering in the plants—people like Martha Grevatt, a lesbian, who was a tool-and-die maker at a Chrysler plant near Cleveland, and Dave Reckinger, a procurement analyst in Chrysler’s Service and Parts Division, both of whom had got in touch with Woods after reading the article about him in Solidarity. One of five women tool-and-die makers in a three-hundred-person department, Grevatt told Woods she’d been the victim of a stream of anti-gay harassment at work. Among other incidents, a co-worker kept a spray can on his workbench labelled “Dyke Repellent”; crude poems and pornography regularly appeared at Grevatt’s workstation. The union took up her complaints, but Chrysler management argued that it could do nothing, because it couldn’t prove who was responsible. Angered by the inaction, Grevatt filed charges with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1990 alleging sex discrimination, a category covered by federal law. The E.E.O.C. declined to proceed, however, when Chrysler argued successfully that Grevatt was being harassed for being gay and for her political views—neither of which is protected by law—rather than for being female.
Reckinger told Woods he’d concealed his sexual orientation since the early seventies, when a co-worker forced him at gunpoint to perform oral sex. Reckinger called the police, who advised him not to press charges; Reckinger, shaken, agreed. The next workday, he reported the incident to Chrysler management and to his union representative, but both said there was nothing they could do because the incident hadn’t occurred on Chrysler premises. Reckinger had to endure more humiliation: the co-worker subsequently boasted to others about what he’d forced Reckinger to do. And though it all happened more than twenty years ago, Reckinger said, he had never got over it.
These and other stories, and Woods’s own experience, spurred him to act, and he focussed, for the first time, on his own employer and industry. In August, 1994, he wrote the first of several letters to Chrysler’s chairman, Robert Eaton. In it he said, “I realize that I am indeed fortunate to have been transferred to C.T.C. This is a good place to work. I often ask myself if I should just be silent and ignore the fact that others are still at risk of intense harassment and discrimination. I have decided that I will not be silent. On moral grounds and partly because I now realize that even here at C.T.C. I am not properly protected, as sexual orientation is not included in any Chrysler policies.”
Woods received a polite letter from Nancy Rae, then the manager of workforce diversity at Chrysler, stressing the point that Chrysler “encourages and values diversity, mutual respect, trust, and integrity.” Woods interpreted this as a rebuff.
Woods’s complaints were also referred to Monica Emerson, a twenty-one-year Chrysler veteran who is the current manager of workforce diversity. Woods and Kremkow met with Emerson, and, according to Kremkow, the interview got off to a bad start. “You don’t understand what I’m going through,” Woods complained. Emerson, who is black, retorted, “You’re looking at the color of my skin and telling me I don’t know what you’re going through?” Woods recalls, “Monica sat across the table and told me we don’t need protection, we don’t need it in writing, because Chrysler won’t tolerate discrimination. Give me a break. I’ve been attacked five times.”
The next year, Woods shifted his focus from Chrysler management to the union. In April, 1995, in what initially seemed a hopeless quest, he ran for the office of delegate to June’s United Auto Workers’ constitutional convention, in Anaheim, and to a special bargaining convention the following year, which would determine proposed contract provisions. Woods threw himself into the effort, printing campaign flyers, developing a seven-plank platform, and giving monthly speeches at the union hall. He emphasized his devotion to the union, noted that his father and two older brothers were union men, and declared that he wanted the union to be more politically active. Terry Kremkow campaigned on his behalf, and was instrumental in swaying many voters. None of Woods’s literature mentioned any gay issues, but when the inevitable question came he was prepared. “I hope it doesn’t matter, because I care about these issues,” he said, referring to his platform.
Read more France Supplies the Spectacle Against Norway
One of Woods’s opponents in the race was the openly homophobic Marcum, who had recently returned to work after his suspension, and he tried to make Woods’s sexual orientation an issue. He filed a complaint with Chrysler management, which he then made public: in it he alleged that Woods had leaned over a partition in the men’s room to stare at Marcum’s penis. No one seriously believed that Woods would provoke someone like Marcum, and the allegation backfired by stirring sympathy for Woods. (Marcum insists that Woods did look at him “suggestively.”)
The election result reflected a remarkable transformation from the days when no one wanted to work with Woods. When the votes were tallied, Woods received eighty, to seventy-three for his closest opponent, who was a longtime Chrysler employee. Marcum got only thirty-one votes—a humiliating defeat. Kremkow referred to Woods the next day as “the giant-killer,” and Woods recalls it as “the happiest day of my life.”
Despite this electoral success, little would have happened without support from the president of Woods’s local, Derek Thiery, whom Woods called immediately after the election to say that he wanted to add two words—“sexual orientation”—to the contract. Like many members of the U.A.W. leadership, Thiery has championed civil rights and progressive social causes to a much greater degree than the rank and file have done. He was impressed by Woods’s election. “For him to run for delegate, with his background, and win, that made me proud,” Thiery says. He was sympathetic, but urged Woods to gain the support of the local’s civil-rights committee first. The committee had been fending off Woods’s proposals for some time, but now, with Thiery’s encouragement, it approved his resolution by a vote of five to one, with one abstention.
That summer, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force held its annual conference in Detroit, and there Woods met Shelley Alpern, a research analyst at the Franklin Research & Development Corporation, in Boston, and told her about his campaign. Alpern, who is thirty-two, is a former human-rights fund-raiser who has shifted her focus from Central America to corporate America. Franklin Research & Development describes itself as North America’s largest money-management firm devoted solely to socially responsible investing, and has about five hundred million dollars under management, including some shares of Chrysler stock. While the position is relatively modest, it gives Franklin’s clients the right to mount proxy challenges. Alpern was then negotiating with Johnson & Johnson, the pharmaceutical manufacturer, and was threatening to mount a proxy fight unless the company banned discrimination against gays and lesbians (which it ultimately did), so she was keenly interested in Woods’s progress at Chrysler. He seemed optimistic that the U.A.W. would prevail.
Passage of Wood’s sexual-orientation resolution sent it to the next step—the joint council—and there Thiery himself spoke in support. It passed without opposition. Woods addressed the special bargaining convention in Detroit the following spring, the first openly gay person ever to speak at a national convention of the U.A.W. Woods spent seven hours the night before rewriting and practicing his speech. Martha Grevatt travelled to Detroit from Cleveland to lend him moral support. At the end of his speech, many of the delegates stood in support. The resolution passed by voice acclamation.
As word of the talks’ progress trickled down to the rank and file, however, Woods began to worry that the sexual-orientation plank wouldn’t end up in the final contract. Nothing definite was said, but he noticed that his frequent calls to the union leadership, and even to his staunchest supporter, Thiery, often went unreturned. (Thiery says it is union policy not to comment on negotiations in progress, and that Woods’s calls were so persistent that Thiery ordered him not to call him at home.) Drawing on his experience at the Cracker Barrel protest, Woods proposed picketing Chrysler’s corporate headquarters in support of the union demand for the sexual-orientation plank. Though the union usually looks askance at single-issue picketing, Thiery gave Woods permission.
On August 28, 1996, about two weeks before the contract was due to expire, five people showed up outside the headquarters building: Woods, Reckinger, a straight friend of Reckinger’s, and two members of PFLAG (an acronym for Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), who had no connection to Chrysler. “Where’s everybody else?” Reckinger asked apprehensively. Although a handful more eventually showed up that day, Woods never did muster more than a dozen protesters at any one time.
At first, the protest attracted scant media attention. Still, Woods had big plans: he assumed that the serious bargaining would begin whenever the U.A.W. declared a strike deadline. He began making preparations to hold an all-night candlelight vigil. But then he heard on CNN that the U.A.W. had reached agreement with Chrysler without even a strike threat.
The next day, at a meeting to discuss the new contract, he managed to talk to Jack Laskowski, the U.A.W. vice-president in charge of the Chrysler negotiations. Laskowski broke the news that Woods’s provision had been rejected and would not be part of the new contract. Laskowski told Woods that he had personally taken to Robert Eaton three final demands that could not be resolved at the negotiating-subcommittee level. Two were what Laskowski called “economic” issues, meaning that they would cost Chrysler hundreds of millions of dollars. The chairman accepted those. Then Laskowski raised the issue of sexual orientation. He says now that it was “unusual” that such an issue, which on its face would cost Chrysler nothing, would even reach Eaton’s level. Yet Eaton refused to accept the U.A.W. position, according to Laskowski, arguing that Chrysler had no intention of discriminating, so such a provision was unnecessary. Laskowski “negotiated hard” on the issue, but “they were dug in on it,” he says. “To me, their position didn’t make any sense. I can’t give a rational answer for why they took the position they did.” (Chrysler now says it doesn’t want to “keep the focus on specific groups,” although the collective-bargaining agreement already does protect certain groups, such as women and blacks.) Thiery, who bargained at the committee level, says Chrysler management argued vehemently that gays should not be a “special group” with “special privileges.” He adds, “It was a knockdown, drag-out yelling issue.” Faced with the choice of accepting the contract as it was negotiated or calling for a strike against Chrysler, Laskowski accepted the contract. Thiery puts the issue bluntly: If the U.A.W. had called for a strike over the sole issue of gay rights, “we would have been skinned alive.”
Woods was dejected. “My rights in the workplace were given away,” he said. When the heads of the various locals met to vote on the contract, Woods showed up and argued that without an anti-discrimination clause it should be rejected. The contract was nonetheless unanimously approved, and Woods’s continuing opposition to the contract angered Laskowski. “I was upset with him,” Laskowski says. “I told him, ‘You’ve gone too far on this one.’ ” Thiery, too, saw a change in Woods. “There was a transition where Ron went from being a strong advocate for his cause, someone who spoke with intelligence and reason, to being an extremist, not just in his speech but in his emotional state.”
Woods’s campaign did not sit well with his constituents on the factory floor, either. They wondered what had happened to the platform on which Woods had campaigned. Kremkow has since observed, “People said, ‘All we hear is gay, gay, gay. You told us to vote for him.’ I said, ‘Maybe I made a bad judgment on character.’ ”
As a loyal union member, Woods was expected to suppress his personal feelings and support the new contract. Instead, he vowed that the picketing of Chrysler’s headquarters would continue, even without U.A.W. support. The following day, alone and in the rain, Woods was back on the picket line.
It wasn’t just members of Woods’s local who were disenchanted with his picketing. Earlier that spring, Woods had received a call from Michelle Marquis, an engineer at Trenton Engine, and Mike Myers, a systems engineer working at headquarters. The two, both in their twenties and members of a gay swim team, had discussed forming a gay employees’ organization modelled on the group at Ford, and then had heard about Woods. Woods urged them to write a letter to Chrysler’s chairman, to come out publicly, to join his campaign, and, eventually, to take part in his picketing.
But Woods’s plan “wasn’t what we envisioned,” Marquis explains. “We wanted a group the company would sanction as an employee group. It wouldn’t sanction a group that it thought was organizing against it.” Moreover, while Marquis and Myers had told colleagues that they were gay, most members of the group they were forming weren’t remotely ready for so public a step as picketing Chrysler headquarters. Myers and Marquis also recognized a cultural gulf separating them from Woods. They were white-collar college graduates, management employees; Woods was suspicious of anyone outside the union. They had not endured what Woods had gone through on the factory floor. About the worst incident that Marquis recalls was telling a co-worker she was a lesbian and receiving the reply “But you’re too pretty to be gay.” Marquis says, “We could understand where Ron was coming from, and why, but we didn’t feel he understood us.”
During the summer of 1996, Myers got in touch with Monica Emerson, Chrysler’s diversity manager, looking for guidance. Then, when Woods began his picketing, Myers and Marquis drafted a letter to Chrysler management outlining goals for their organization, in which they tacitly tried to distance themselves from what they considered Woods’s radical tactics. Marquis, in contrast to Woods, found Emerson to be “very accepting, very willing to talk about things, very honest. She was blunt—she said it was going to be hard to convince some people, and timing would be an issue.” Emerson has since told me that she very well may have urged patience and indicated that it was a difficult subject for the Chrysler management. “This is a topic that may in fact make some people uncomfortable,” she said. “It takes time for them to learn about it and to become comfortable.”
Others were less patient, however. Alpern, the shareholder activist in Boston, was dismayed when Woods told her that his bargaining initiative had failed. She wrote to Robert Eaton on October 4th, saying that “we are greatly concerned that Chrysler does not include sexual orientation in its nondiscrimination policy and has recently rejected the U.A.W.’s demand that it do so.” She argued that non-discrimination simply makes good business sense for Chrysler, not only in that it boosts gay and lesbian employee morale but in that negative publicity hurts sales to gay customers. (Alpern noted that Toyota, Subaru, and G.M.’s Saturn are marketed aggressively to the gay community; Subaru acts as a corporate sponsor for the Rainbow Card, a credit card that donates a percentage of its revenues to gay and lesbian community groups.)
Alpern’s letter triggered a flurry of negotiations. “At first, they were very hesitant,” she recalls. “I couldn’t get any clear answers.” She told Chrysler in November that she was encouraged by their discussions, but she also said that she felt she had no choice but to file a shareholder resolution, to be included in proxy statements, calling for steps designed to end discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation at Chrysler. Chrysler’s response was to try to block the resolution at the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Nevertheless, even while opposing Alpern at the S.E.C., Chrysler issued a series of letters and statements to employees which addressed her concerns. On November 11th, Chrysler mailed a statement from Eaton to each employee stating that sexual orientation was to be included within the company’s policies promoting tolerance for diversity. Alpern’s response to the move was that she wanted to see something more concrete. In January of this year, Chrysler’s vice-president for employee relations, Tom Gallagher, and the U.A.W.’s Laskowski signed a letter acknowledging that Eaton’s letter was “consistent” with the collective-bargaining agreement. Finally, Chrysler revised its Standards of Conduct and its Code of Ethical Behavior to include sexual orientation. Alpern agreed to withdraw the proposed shareholder resolution. She calls the measures “a good first step.”
The measures may reflect a moral commitment, but they could also insulate Chrysler from employee lawsuits alleging discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Potential legal liability appears to be the main reason that many companies have opposed legislation making such discrimination illegal. (Chrysler has never taken a position on such legislation.) Even Alpern concedes that “there are numerous frivolous lawsuits,” yet she maintains that it’s hard to imagine repealing laws outlawing discrimination on the basis of race, sex, or religion simply because many of the complaints lack merit.
Predictably, gay employees had differing reactions to Chrysler’s letters and pledges of non-discrimination. Marquis is pleased. Myers finds them encouraging, but he left Chrysler just before Eaton’s letter was sent out, because other contract employees, who received less favorable job evaluations, had repeatedly been hired for full-time positions ahead of him. Woods denounces them as a sham meant to divert attention from the real problem of virulent homophobia at Chrysler. Still, his picketing effort came to an end on November 26, 1996—not, he emphasizes, because he was satisfied with Chrysler’s policy statements but because the weather got too cold.
Monica Emerson says that, apart from Woods’s highly visible protest, she has received few complaints from gay employees at Chrysler. While she says she cannot discuss Woods’s situation, K. C. Hortop, a lawyer for Chrysler, said, “We do, in general, deny his allegations of mistreatment by Chrysler.” Emerson continues, “I can’t discuss specific numbers, but complaints about gay discrimination are very, very few. Of course, even one is too many.” She says that all disciplinary actions are confidential, so she can’t give any examples of investigations undertaken or punishment meted out for anti-gay harassment. “We recognize that in a company the size of Chrysler there may be incidents of inappropriate behavior,” she says. “We do take swift and severe corrective action when we find it is warranted and appropriate.” Other than Marcum, none of the people Woods has complained about have been demoted or suspended, though a few were told not to bother Woods.
One reason that there haven’t been many complaints from gay employees may be that few employees are willing to identify themselves as gay. A contract worker at Chrysler was told that his contract had expired the day after he registered a sexual-harassment complaint with Chrysler’s diversity department. (Chrysler says his departure had nothing to do with the fact that he’s gay or that he filed a complaint.) I spoke with a number of gay Chrysler employees, from various levels of the company, and was told of more—employees who believe that they or people they know have suffered from anti-gay bias but would not identify themselves as being gay, out of fear of even worse repercussions. Some gay employees at Chrysler have made use of a Web site that Woods created. He has received messages from about twenty people citing incidents of what they felt was discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, but many of those who responded to the site have also asked not to be named, no doubt out of fear.
Allan Gilmour, the former Ford vice-chairman, told me that he wouldn’t have revealed his homosexuality if he had still been employed at Ford. “I would not have come out at the company. That would not have been appropriate. I was aware of a few other gay executives. They thought it would be inappropriate, dangerous to their careers.” Even though Gilmour himself had remained in the closet and, as vice-chairman, had long been viewed as the heir apparent to Ford’s chairman, Harold Poling, he was passed over for the top job when Poling retired, in 1993. Gilmour says he was told “he lacked the breadth of operating experience” needed for the job. Others in the Detroit business community, however, believe that the Ford family would not accept a gay chairman. A Ford spokesperson, Francine Romine-MacBride, says that the company won’t comment on such speculation but suggests that Gilmour’s “very distinguished career at Ford” speaks well to the company’s tolerance for gay executives.
Whatever their personal feelings about gay rights and workplace issues, Chrysler executives repeatedly say that their only goal is to sell as many cars and trucks as possible. In this effort, Chrysler, like many other large consumer companies, uses its enormous advertising clout to make sure its ads don’t appear in contexts that might alienate potential buyers. Chrysler says that in recent years it cancelled scheduled ads on TV shows that focussed on the O. J. Simpson trial and, before that, on the Gulf War, because feelings about those subjects had become so polarized. Homosexuality falls into the same category. Even as the company was issuing its statements pledging non-discrimination, reports that Ellen DeGeneres, the star of “Ellen,” was a lesbian and that her character might come out of the closet on national television caused consternation in Chrysler’s marketing department, since Chrysler is a major sponsor of “Ellen” and had committed to advertising on a number of episodes.
“When something takes on a life of its own, it’s not a good media environment,” says Megan Giles, a Chrysler spokeswoman who handled the “Ellen” controversy. “There was extreme hype in the media about this. It was very polarized. You were annoying people by even being mentioned in the same sentence.” Chrysler’s concern about controversy was borne out on March 27th, when Robert Eaton received a letter from Jerry Falwell demanding that Chrysler cancel its ads and never advertise on “Ellen” again or face a consumer boycott. Giles says that by the time Chrysler received the letter from Falwell it had already made the decision to drop the ads.
Perhaps inevitably, Chrysler’s action set off exactly the kind of controversy that the company had said it hoped to avoid. There was widespread media interest, even though Chrysler was hardly the only major company to cancel ads. (General Motors, Johnson & Johnson, Wendy’s, and J. C. Penney were among those who did, but they managed to avoid much of the publicity.) “We had lots of inquiries,” Giles says. “Major newspapers, TV, tabloids. We were somewhat surprised. When something like this becomes a referendum on what your company is about, it comes as a surprise. Our intent is to sell the most vehicles we can to the most customers and not alienate anyone. Why would we want to be in the middle of a controversy?”
Marquis and other members of People of Diversity now questioned the sincerity of Chrysler’s tolerance for gay employees, and even considered issuing a statement on the subject to the national press. “It was frustrating,” Marquis says. “People told me they felt sick.”
Alpern, too, was upset. “As soon as the ink was dry” on the non-discrimination declarations, “they violated the spirit of them,” she says. “That was very disappointing, and I sent a letter to them to that effect.”
A few weeks earlier, Esquire was reported to have killed the David Leavitt story because of pressure from Chrysler. Another Chrysler spokesperson, Terri Houtman, explains that although Chrysler, like many large advertisers, insists that magazines in which it advertises (including The New Yorker) notify it of potentially controversial articles, neither Chrysler nor its advertising agency in New York knew anything about the Esquire piece or the decision to cancel it. “We just heard that in an editorial review there was concern that advertisers may wish to move,” Houtman says. Still, she confirms that if the story did contain graphic gay sex Chrysler would have pulled its ads from that issue (though not, she emphasizes, from subsequent issues of the magazine) for much the same reasons that it cancelled its “Ellen” ads. (Ed Kosner, Esquire’s editor at the time, has said he killed the story for editorial reasons.)
While Chrysler’s actions seemed to placate the religious right—the company heard nothing further from Falwell—the negative reaction from gays, lesbians, and their supporters came as a surprise. Chrysler was flooded with calls, both against and in support of their action regarding “Ellen.” According to Giles, Chrysler has had to reconsider the long-held notion that religious conservatives are better organized, more likely to call for a boycott, and pose a more serious threat to sales than other special-interest groups. The gay-rights advocates “appear to be equally well organized,” Giles says. “Once they got their bearings, they were prolific. They’re prepared to do battle.” Caught between gay advocates and the religious right, she says, “We don’t want to pick a fight with either one.”
Chrysler resumed advertising on “Ellen” shortly after the controversial episode aired, even though subsequent episodes continued to explore gay themes. While Chrysler hasn’t yet decided about next season, it is continuing to advertise this summer. “We like the demographic we’re getting,” Giles says. “That’s what we’re interested in, not anybody’s life style.”
The “Ellen” and Esquire controversies reinforced Woods’s suspicions about Chrysler’s intentions. But they also seemed remote. “Managing a bookstore in Southern California”—what TV’s Ellen does for a living—“is worlds removed from working in a factory. It’s dreamland,” he told me.
The depth of his personal struggle had been clear since May of 1996, just a month after his successful speech at the U.A.W. convention: he decided to run for shop steward, even though that meant running against Terry Kremkow, who considered himself Woods’s best friend at the plant. Kremkow was hurt and angered. This time, Woods had trouble mustering support. According to Kremkow, “People figured out that everything he ran for was strictly for the gay movement.” Woods was asked frequently about what some co-workers now referred to as his “gay-rights shit.” He, in turn, accused co-workers of homophobia. Bill Witmer tried to warn Woods. “Not everyone is against you,” he said. “Some people are hurt. They never did anything to you. Be careful. The people who do accept you for being gay—you’re going to turn them against you.”
The evening of the vote, Woods called the union hall where the votes were being posted. “Give me the bad news,” he remembers asking.
“Well, let’s put it this way,” replied the man who was tallying the votes. “Did you vote for yourself?”
Woods was stunned. “Don’t tell me I only got one vote.”
After hanging up, Woods cried.
Woods’s friendship with Kremkow quickly deteriorated. That November, while continuing his picketing, he reported for work, and his supervisor confronted him with a computerized list of incidents of alleged tardiness. Woods concedes that the picketing made him three to five minutes late on several occasions, but says such delays were common. He expected Kremkow, as his shop steward, to back him up, but when Kremkow was summoned, Woods says, he sided with the supervisor. Kremkow says that such lists were routine and that Woods was not being treated any differently from others. Woods asked to speak to Kremkow alone, so the two went out into the hallway.
Both Kremkow and Woods were highly agitated and shouted at each other. Woods says that Kremkow shoved him hard against a drinking fountain. Kremkow claims that Woods tried to taunt him, saying, “You want to hit me, don’t you?” Each denies the other’s account. After the altercation, the two returned to the conference room, where Woods’s supervisor and security personnel were waiting. “Ron, are you O.K.? You don’t seem right, you’re acting bizarre,” Woods recalls the supervisor saying. Security asked Woods if he required medical assistance and he said, “Yes.” He was taken to the hospital, observed for six hours, and released.
Woods, now bereft of both management and union support, compounded the problem by filing a grievance against Kremkow alleging “conduct unbecoming a union member.” After a one-day trial in January, a tribunal of union members found Kremkow “obviously innocent” of Woods’s charges. But the internal rift and the trial traumatized Woods’s local. Kremkow says, “People are paralyzed. There’s now more fear of Ron than vice versa. They’re afraid he’s going to make an allegation. I was afraid for my job.” He continues, “I don’t care if someone is black, green, or gay. I resent that he’s hiding behind his sexual orientation. That’s what everyone else feels after the trial.”
Kremkow then charged Woods with maliciously filing charges against another union member. Woods was found guilty. For this reason, he explained the day I visited him, he had just been suspended from his union for two years. “It breaks my heart,” he said. (Both Woods and Kremkow are appealing the ruling; Kremkow wants Woods expelled.)
Woods now seems blinded by his sense of injustice, and his effectiveness at Chrysler and in the U.A.W. is waning. He says he feels lonely and isolated, is having trouble sleeping, and has begun taking antidepressant medication. In early May, he arranged an extended medical leave, and is getting counselling. He says he has trouble believing that it has come to this. “I never meant to be an activist,” he says. “I grew up poor. My father worked fourteen-hour days and lost his business in the 1980 recession. We lost everything. I wanted a car that would work, a house. I just wanted a decent life.”
His colleagues, even former supporters, see things differently. “Ron could have been a national advocate, depending on how he handled himself,” Thiery says. “He still could be. But instead he just went over the edge.” Woods’s co-workers on the second shift were recently asked to attend diversity training, in which they were told not to make anti-gay comments or gestures. “Some people made fun of it,” according to Witmer. “A lot of guys were pissed off. They think Ron should quit his bellyaching.” Witmer says that even he is distancing himself from Woods to stay out of the controversy. “I’ve got to work with these guys, too,” he explains.
Still, Woods’s activism, by the standards of corporate America, has already brought about significant change at Chrysler, and his presence in their midst has made his co-workers some of the most gay-aware factory workers in the country. Everyone I spoke to in Woods’s unit described a shift from ignorance about gays and lesbians and overt hostility toward Woods to at least grudging acceptance. Even Marcum says his thinking about gays has changed. “His being gay is not my problem,” he says. “They have their way of being. I don’t have to accept it, but this is America.”
In this regard, the autoworkers may be significantly ahead of top Chrysler management. During late May, two high-ranking Chrysler executives met with Marquis, another member of People of Diversity, and Monica Emerson to discuss the group’s goals. It was the first time representatives of gay and lesbian employees had discussed their issues with senior management. Emerson reports, “There was some laughter, some blushing, some embarrassment over the topics that were being raised.” ♦
Read more The Coastal Mysteries of “Romería” and “Rose of Nevada”