North Country, the Movie

North Country is a semi-fictionalized film of a long legal battle of group of women miners who endured a hostile work environment and numerous and continuous insults and unwanted touching when they became the first women to go work at the Eveleth Mines in northern Minnesota. The issue at the center of North Country is sexual harassment and equality in the workplace. The sexual harassment complaint was filed in court on October 5, 1984 and the women won the first sexual harassment class-action suit in the United States on December 28, 1998.

The suit pitted a handful of female workers against their employer, Eveleth Mines in northern Minnesota, and hinged on both physical and psychological abuse that would have sent most people, men included, running for the exits. North Country is one of those films that strive to tell a hard, bitter story with as much uplift as possible to keep the viewers attention. The men at the mine don't want the handful of women the government has forced the company to employ working there, supposedly taking jobs from them and invading their rough and ready, male-dominated environment.

Sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination that violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature constitutes sexual harassment when submission to or rejection of this conduct explicitly or implicitly affects an individual's employment, unreasonably interferes with an individual's work performance or creates an intimidating, hostile or offensive work environment. (http://www.eeoc.gov/facts/fs-sex.html)

Title VII of the Civil Rights neither required nor prohibits affirmative action but the Equal Employment Opportunity helped women but some employees thought the company used a quota system, which would violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

There are two types of sexual harassment in the workplace, quid-pro-quo and hostile environment. Quid-pro-quo is Latin for "this for that." It is a trade. When the trade is on the basis of sex, it is illegal. This is the when the employer makes sex a prerequisite to getting something in the workplace. For example: "sleep with me and you'll get the job." That's illegal. Quid-pro-quo can also include negatives. For example, "sleep with me or you're fired" is also illegal.

Hostile environment sexual harassment in the workplace is a situation in which the employer, supervisor, or co-worker does or says things that make the victim feel uncomfortable because of his or her