An Update - Drake v. Lockheed

Since we wrote about Norman Drake's successful lawsuit against Lockheed Corporation in the October 1991 issue of DataLine, things have heated up. The company has appealed the $925,000 verdict, and Drake's attorney, William Woodson, has filed thirteen additional lawsuits against the company for discrimination, harassment, and retaliation. Woodson has heard from so many more employees who say they've experienced discrimination or harassment, he tells them that he can't even schedule an appointment to see them until sometime this summer.

Whatever the outcome of the various lawsuits, the company's response to Norman Drake and others may go down as a textbook case in how not to handle allegations of harassment and discrimination.

Eileen Waldron, a producer at a CBS television affiliate, began following the Lockheed story last year. According to Waldron, Lockheed executives, including the president of Lockheed Missile and Space Company, John McMahon, agreed to be interviewed on camera, but later reneged. Some time after Waldron's crew filmed Lockheed minority and women employees picketing the company's Sunnyvale facility, the local newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News, also responded in print. Reporter Michelle Levander at the paper had been following events at Lockheed for months, but no major articles appeared until the middle of this month, in a front page story in a Sunday edition. Both Levander and Waldron described Lockheed's long history of many complaints and retaliation against anyone who made his or her complaint formal and public.

Mr. McMahon did agree to be interviewed by the newspaper, and dismissed the allegations of race and sex discrimination and harassment as "a fight or altercation among employees" and characterized the scores of employees who have made complaints to the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) and other agencies, or who have filed lawsuits, as "a spattering of people who ... certainly don't represent the community of employees at Lockheed." (San Jose Mercury News, March 15, 1991) Company spokesman Bob Burgess echoed McMahon's view that the company and its management do not bear responsibility for the decades' long history of problems at Lockheed. "I don't know," he told the Mercury News reporter who asked him why things had "gotten so out of hand" at the facility. "Obviously, situations like this do arise wherever you have people".

Reliance on explanations like these -- "It's not our fault. This is a problem that exists between individuals, not within the organization" -- may actually be part of the problem. It's an argument that might be credible at a company that had experienced one discrimination complaint, or even several. But when the complaints are as widespread as they are at Lockheed, management's unwillingness to accept responsibility for -- and address -- the problem is clearly part of the problem. There are plenty of companies that don't have widespread complaints of discrimination -- companies where discriminatory behavior or retaliation against individuals who have made complaints is simply not tolerated by top management. Further, many observers in the media and in Congress are asking how a federal contractor, which is supposed to be held to higher standards than companies that are not doing business with the federal government, has been able to achieve so little in the area of equal employment opportunity.

We recognize that Lockheed's attorneys may be advising management to persist in the assertion that these are problems between individuals; to acknowledge that there might be a pattern could open the company to a vaster array of evidence and issues that could be presented in court. Still, we have to ask how many complaints will it take for management to admit that there is a bigger problem here. Until the pattern is exposed, the individual occurrences will continue and probably accelerate.

We also realize that Mr. McMahon, who joined Lockheed in 1988, inherited many of the problems in "managing diversity" that are now splattering all over the media and back into OFCCP. (OFCCP has reopened its investigation of the Satellite Center where Norman Drake works, after the office of Tom Campbell, Republican Congressman for Sunnyvale, learned that OFCCP investigators had not reviewed the testimony in Norman Drake's case.) Coming from the Central Intelligence Agency as he does, Mr. McMahon may regard public flinging about of dirty laundry as close to a mortal sin. But to declare "it's dead wrong to say Lockheed is racist" is simply not responsive to the specific claims of specific acts over many years by a wide range of employees, who, if they are not representative of "the community of employees" at Lockheed, are a pretty representative sample of the women and people of color employed at Lockheed.

Mr. McMahon also told Mercury News reporter Michelle Levander that Lockheed, with 19,000 employees was "like a small city" and that individuals inevitably brought their prejudices with them to the organization. What Mr. McMahon and other Lockheed executives seem not to grasp, however, is that Lockheed as an institution may not be any more or less racist than the next defense contractor, but, like many cities, small or large, it's got termites -- the workers and managers who disdain civil rights laws and our country's basic concept of fairness. Saying "obviously, situations like this termite problem do arise wherever you've got wood" is not going to help. Termites may be inevitable, but their ability to eat entire floors and walls requires action, not acquiescence. And it's important to remember that termites hide in the ground and in the infrastructure; The people in front of the building carrying placards -- visible, out in the open -- are not the problem.