Schlumberger hit with $100M harrassment lawsuit.
Woman on West Texas rig says she faced assault, groping, retaliation
A woman who worked as field engineer at Schlumberger has sued the oil field services company for $100 million, alleging pervasive sexual harassment and a workplace culture that accepted it.
Sara Saidman said in the lawsuit that she was 21 years old and only months out of college when she started at Schlumberger in May 2016, working on an oil rig in West Texas. Within weeks, she alleged in the suit, she was “objectified, assaulted, groped, threatened, retaliated against, and exposed to physical danger by her colleagues on oil rigs.”
The 40-page complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Houston, seeks to be certified as a class action lawsuit and claims that Houston-based oil field services giant violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Michael Palmer, a New York lawyer and one of the attorneys representing Saidman in the case, said his law firm is talking with several current and former Schlumberger employees who may join the lawsuit.
The lawsuit alleges that Saidman faced constant sexual harassment and company officials did little to stop it after she reported it to the company’s human resources department.
Schlumberger, which has principal offices in Houston, said the company has not been served with the lawsuit and did not provide any additional comment. Schlumberger is the world’s biggest oil field services company.
Saidman graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pittsburgh in 2016 with a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and minor in petroleum engineering and chemistry, according to court documents. In May 2016, Saidman began her
stint at Schlumberger as a measurements-while-drilling field engineer.
During her one year of employment, she worked on rigs in Texas, New Mexico, North Dakota and Oklahoma.
About 95 percent of Schlumberger’s employees on the rigs are men, according to the lawsuit. The company’s formal policies instruct employees who have been harassed to “politely” confront the harassers themselves before seeking assistance from management, Palmer said.
The lawsuit claims that Schlumberger allowed “a terrorizing environment where men discriminate against their female colleagues with impunity” and “knowingly permitted male workers to treat women who work on oil rigs as sex objects and second-class citizens.”
Saidman was forced to share a trailer and bedroom with three men, according to the lawsuit. Neither the trailer nor the bedroom had locks on the door, the lawsuit said.
Several of Saidman’s male colleagues, the lawsuit alleged, “encouraged the other men who worked on the rig to break into Saidman’s room at night and ignore her if she did not consent to sexual activity, assuring them that ‘she likes it whether or not she wants it’ and ‘the more she screams, the more she wants it.’ ”
When Saidman complained to superiors, the lawsuit, said, she was initially suspended without pay and then fired in May 2017.
Saidman was repeatedly advised against reporting her experiences to Schlumberger and told to “‘get over herself,’ ‘learn to deal with it,’ and ‘not make a fuss’ because seeking redress from the company would ‘backfire’ on her and ‘torpedo’ her career,” the lawsuit said.
Before she complained, according to the lawsuit, Saidman was an instrumental part of a team that broke a Schlumberger record for fastest drilling time using a specific tool. In January 2017, she received a positive performance review and was promoted after just eight months on the job.
But that didn’t spare her from “rampant discrimination and sexual harassment” or retaliation, the lawsuit claimed.
“Women who have the courage to seek recourse, including Ms. Saidman, are promptly blacklisted by human resources and management personnel,” the lawsuit said. “Schlumberger makes it nearly impossible for women who have been sexually harassed to find recourse.”