The Levi Experiment

In many ways San Francisco's Levi Strauss & Co., producer of the famous blue denim Levis, is a model employer. It pays top wages, and pioneered in hiring and promoting blacks. Yet Levi Strauss managers failed until recently to grasp the importance of the rising aspirations of women. Today, typical of many companies, Levi Strauss is striving to redress that lapse with a new program designed to give women the same job opportunities as men. Chairman Walter A. Haas Jr. was moved to act by pressures from the Government, from his conscience and from his customers. Levi Strauss sells mainly to young people who have plenty of progressive notions, and the company could ill afford to carry a male chauvinist label.

Bunched Low. The company, which employs 18,000 people in 35 plants, began to study a year ago how its women were treated. It found that most women were bunched into the lowest-paying jobs as secretaries, patternmakers, stencilers. Most men were in the better paid posts as salesmen or cloth cutters. Though 85% of the company's employees were women, only 9% of the 572 managers were women. Says Sharon Weiner, who heads Levi Strauss's "Affirmative Action Program for Women": "When a woman came to the door for a job, she was told only about those that had historically been held by women. Nobody ever sat down and thought what it was like to be a woman in the company."

One of the new program's immediate goals is to lift more women into jobs that once were monopolized by men. The first woman recently completed the management-training program; she is now a product manager. All together, 13 other women have been promoted to management positions after on-the-job training.

The chiefs of all the company's manufacturing divisions are under orders to appoint women to the next two management posts that open in their personnel departments. Personnel Boss Thomas Borrelli rejects the notion that women are bad management risks because they are more likely to leave than men. Says he: "The tendency has been to compare the turnover of managers with the turnover of secretaries. But if you look at the turnover of women managers, it is probably less than men."

Secretaries Out. For the first time, Levi Strauss is moving women into its field sales force; two are already working, one is in training, and orders are out to hire at least seven more before September. Some retailers warned that women in selling would have trouble with lecherous buyers. Haas rejects that argument. A more serious concern is that married saleswomen with children could face problems at home if they were forced to put in three-day or four-day stretches on the road. "We let the woman decide if she can handle it," says Borrelli.

Levi Strauss is also working to upgrade some office jobs that are now held by women. In the past year, 15 secretaries have been raised to administrative assistants--and not in name only. They allocate department budgets, make periodic changes in the size of salesmen's territories and investigate the causes of canceled orders. Indeed, top management reasons that many executives can do without secretaries; some are being phased out by promotion or attrition. The company has also liberalized its maternity-leave policy. In the past, women who left had no guarantee that they would get their jobs back. Now they can take up to 60 days' leave and be assured that their old posts will be waiting for them; Borrelli says that most women find this arrangement adequate.

For all its moderately bright beginnings, Levi Strauss's experiment has yet to resolve some problems. Upgrading and training secretaries for the new higher-paying administrative posts is an added company expense.

In Levi Strauss's sales and distribution departments, transfers are considered part of the job, but married women find it tough to relocate because their husbands will not leave their jobs. Beyond that, Levi Strauss, like many other companies, may have trouble meeting the new job demands of competing groups of activists. Says Borrelli: "There just aren't that many job openings. We are under pressure to hire women, blacks, Chicanos and Viet Nam veterans. I told our chairman that about 80% of our new managerial positions in the next five years could well be filled with non-males or non-WASPS. If you are a woman, a college graduate and a minority group member, you really have it made."

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