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60 Minutes | Video Transcript
MALE VOICE: -coal miners who are suing the coal company for not protecting them from sexual harassment on the job. It all began here just outside Wheeling, West Virginia, at Shoemaker, a coal mine owned and operated by the Consolidation Coal Company. Most of the miners who work here are men. But there are a few women. Generally, they work right alongside the men doing basically the same work. They are supposed to be treated as equals. That's the law.
The fact is that often they're not treated equally. And like women who work in factories and offices, virtually every day they are subjected to some form of sexual harassment. It comes with the job.
FEMALE VOICE: And he would tell the guys if you do a good job today, I'll let you come out after we're done. And while the girls are showering, I'll let you watch them. We always thought they were kidding and stuff. And I'm sure they probably were. But we didn't know that there was really a hole there.
MALE VOICE: But there was a peephole. And Judy Simmons found it.
JUDY SIMMONS: All I can say is I looked through it and I saw light on the other side of the hole. And you could see all the way through to the shower room.
MALE VOICE: They came to the offices of Wheeling attorney Jim Bordas and instituted a legal suit against Consolidation Coal for $5.5 million, charging that since company supervisors had been peeking through the hole, the company should be responsible.
JIM BORDAS: In order to really force a company to correct a wrong, oftentimes they have to be hit in the pocketbook to encourage them to change the wrongs that have been done to people in the past so that these things won't occur in the future. And that is one of the basic reasons that we're asking for punitive damages in this case.
MALE VOICE: Last week, the women miners got their settlement. Was it for big dollars? We don't know. One of the conditions imposed by the judge was that the women not disclose the amount.
