A day after ex-member Jennifer Murray won a $750,000 jury verdict in sexual harassment suit against Int’l Longshoremen’s & Warehousemen’s Union Locals 19 and 98 in Seattle and others, she and her family were threatened. Murray says she received death threats Feb. 13 and her mother was cursed by Longshoremen at a restaurant. Murray is so terrified, she plans to move away with her two children. Murray’s stepfather, a lifelong union foreman won’t speak to her. “My (step)dad wants nothing to do with me because I sued. I am no longer his daughter,” Murray said.
In July 1996, two weeks after she had a baby, Murray claimed she was repeatedly molested by a fellow Longshoremen in the hold of a cargo ship. She protested each time the man thrust himself on her. Before that, she said she had been subjected to unsolicited sexual comments and harassment that included being stalked by a Longshoreman. He left offensive notes on her car, threatening messages on her phone and once rammed his semi-truck into her truck while she was pregnant. Murray said she reported every incident to the foreman or dispatchers. The man, she said, was never reprimanded. Murray found the work environment so hostile she never went back. It amounted to a wrongful termination according to her attorney. [Seattle Times 2/19/99]