Independent Lens

- Take a good look at your career choices.

As secretary, you need to be the best you can be.

- The bosses got to give the orders to women who were there to wait on them.

- Get the coffee.

Pick up the dry cleaning.

- There was nowhere to go.

- Nowhere to turn.

- Nothing-- nothing ever changed.

- This isn't right.

There's something you can do about it.

Everything exploded.

- Workin' 9 to 5 What a way to make a living - This untapped group of women whose voice was not being heard.

We decided to call it "9 to 5."

The movie was married to a movement.

- I'm not just a secretary.

I'm a secretary.

female announcer: "9 to 5," the story of a movement, now only on Independent Lens.

[pensive music] [static] [mellow, jazzy music playing] - The clerical field is particularly important to women.

Women hold 70% of the jobs.

[mellow instrumentals] - Take a good look at your career choices.

That's what Patty McGrath did after four years of college and even one term toward her master's degree.

As secretary, you need to be the best you can be.

So patty worked harder, and now she types 110 words per minute.

Janet keeps her hands in condition for typing with finger gymnastics.

She can keep it up all day if she has to.

[ding] - My mother, from the get-go, said "Mary, you don't need to go to college.

It would be good enough for you to be a secretary and to work in an office, find a nice husband, and have children, and life will be great."

- My father had different expectations of me than he had of my brothers.

At one point, he even said-- 'cause I came home with a good report card, you know--and he said, "Well, girls who are walking encyclopedias should remember that reference books are never taken out."

- My first job was a full ghetto of college-educated women doing incredibly dull work.

And I kept thinking, "This is how I'm gonna make it in the publishing world?"

- Walking into offices as a 20-something-year-old, I felt, "I better look nice.

I better be nice."

- He may act like he wants a secretary, but most of the time they're looking for something between a mother and a waitress.

- There was this system where the bosses got to give the orders to women who were there to wait on them.

- Get the coffee.

Pick up the dry cleaning.

- As servants, really.

- Pick up the holiday presents for the staff and for the-- for the family members.

- Peggy, any messages?

Got it.

[phone rings] - Hold on a second, the other phone's ringing.

- The third floor was data entry.

There were no white people.

The second floor was for professionals, and I saw no Black people.

- He told me... "You've been terminated."

Just--nobody ever asked me anything.

Never--I never got a chance to explain the story, nothing.

- It was perfectly legal to fire somebody for being pregnant, for going off on maternity leave.

- I was interviewed by this man, and he made it perfectly clear what I would need to do in order to get the job.

- My boss touched my breasts.

He rubbed up against me.

"Nice legs."

I mean, just the gamut.

- Most secretary jobs are dead-end jobs.

- You better like your life as a office worker, because whatever you were doing was what you were gonna be doing 20 years from then.

And you got to wear pantyhose every day.

- If you had a problem, if your supervisor was unfair, you had no recourse.

- If I don't like you, I'll fire ya.

- Right, right.

- You don't like me, I'll fire ya.

- There was nowhere to go.

- There was nowhere to go.

- Nowhere to turn.

- Nothing-- nothing ever changed.

- You see a lifetime of this in front of you... And you decide you're gonna do something about it.

[projector clicking] - Tomorrow is Women's Strike Day, the day that women are being asked to stop typing, stop selling, stop cleaning house, stop doing dishes, and start demanding equal rights with men.

all: Equal pay for equal rights.

When do we want it?

Now!

Equal pay for equal rights.

When do we want it?

Now.

- A group of secretaries would draw a crowd on any sunny lunch hour-- - 35 women took over the hallway on the 13th floor-- - The harassment and the discrimination that has been going on in my office has got to stop.

- Stop the violation of state law with the use of their illegal application forms.

- He was inspired by the film "9 to 5," where we had-- - No, we inspired the film "9 to 5."

- You.

Yes, you did.

- The forces of change have been set in motion.

And they've been set in motion by the 9to5 organization.

[women cheering, whistling] [stirring music] - People don't ask me that much about 9to5.

- No.

No.

No, never, ever.

Ever.

- No.

They don't ask.

Mm-mm.

But now, I tell you what, if somebody get in trouble, guess where they come.

To me.

And they know that I'm gonna fight for them.

They know that.

[indistinct chatter] [upbeat music] - To challenge authority, to challenge common wisdom, that was part of my family growing up.

They thought the war in Vietnam was wrong.

My--every Saturday at-- for an hour at noon, my entire family would go to do a silent vigil at the local library.

My family was concerned about social justice.

I learned that there was strength in numbers.

You can fight City Hall.

In high school, I had been part of the Social Action Club.

We got called into the principal's office, and there was a question about whether I would get expelled.

I was already knee-deep in stirring things up.

- My parents thought it was very important for me and my brother to, uh, to understand some of the problems in America.

They would take us around neighborhoods in Baltimore where we were living and point out segregated housing.

And when the civil rights movement came to our town, I was on those picket lines.

In our family, there was this whole panoply of grandmothers and great-aunts and aunts and so on who let me know that their dreams had been thwarted.

And so I think I felt this pressure of, was I going to be slotted into some position and not be able to get out?

- In college, I think I met Ellen the second day, and we became friends immediately.

[soft music] - Karen was a little scary.

She was tough.

I could sort of shelter under her wing, and she would take me interesting places.

In college, I was dying to study Aristotle and Plato and just put my head down and get a great classical education.

- No, my goal was never to be an educated woman.

I wanted to become a political activist.

That, to me, was much more interesting than being in college.

I dropped out of college.

I moved to Boston.

I started organizing for the antiwar movement, and I got a job as a clerical worker.

'Cause that's what women did.

- Karen was working at Harvard.

I was an experienced clerk typist, so I quickly got a job there too.

One day, my boss came to me in my office and said, "I'd like you to remove the calendar from my wall."

And then he went back to his office.

And then I retraced his steps and went to the wall in his office and removed the calendar.

I thought, "What--what is that?

Why can't he do that himself?"

- It was noon.

There was nobody else in the office except for me.

A student comes in and looks me dead in the eye and says, "Isn't anybody here?"

Can't you see me?

I'm right in front of your eyes.

I'm here.

- What is going on here?

We keep this place running, and yet we don't get recognized, we don't get enough money, and we want something different.

We started organizing the Harvard Office Workers Group.

These were ten kind of average folks.

We talked about our backgrounds and what we were experiencing on the job.

Really, the truth is, you get any ten women together and you start talking, and that's enough.

- We decided to call it 9to5.

It was an identity that was neutral.

You didn't have to have any other assumptions except, "Oh yeah, I work 9 to 5."

And I remember the very first issue of the newsletter.

It starts, "Every morning..." You know, it doesn't say, "Working women of the world, unite."

It says, "I'm gonna open the door to you.

"Let's sit down over a cup of coffee and share a little bit."

- In these newsletters that we handed out at subway exits in Boston, we talked about what it was like to be working in offices.

- I really believe that what I'm doing is very important to the economy and that I should have some respect for what I'm doing, as well as higher pay and all.

I'm still listed as a low-income person even though I work every day of the year.

- Do you work for a living?

- Yes, I do.

- Do you feel chained to your typewriter?

- In a way, yes.

- My favorite letter that ever came in to 9to5 says, "We are referred to as girls until the day we retire without pension."

I just thought, "Whoa."

In those ten words, she got it all.

- And I was sitting on the bus, and I had my stack of newsletters, and I saw these two women, probably in their 40s.

They were saying to each other, "Oh, there's that newspaper again.

Oh, I know that.

I read that."

And there we were... [energetic music] This untapped group of women whose voice was not being heard in the women's movement, in the labor movement, and in the business world.

People were ready to do something.

We decided that we were going to go for the big bucks and we asked for a meeting with the director of personnel.

And we had demands.

- We rehearsed for weeks.

And he met with us.

- This didn't happen, and I think he had never been in such a meeting.

The big revelation was that his hands were trembling.

We were terrified, but he was too.

- Nothing.

[laughing] Absolutely nothing.

Yes, he waited us out... and we didn't get anywhere.

- You know, we didn't have a follow-up plan.

- I think at that point was when we realized I needed to go to the Midwest Academy to find out, then what do you do?

- The Midwest Academy was a training school for organizers.

We all chipped in to help send her to the session over that summer.

- Heather Booth was the director.

She was a new phenomenon for me.

She expected to be standing up in front of a group and talking, and she expected all the rest of us to do that.

I had proudly brought a stack of the newsletters that we had distributed, and she flipped through them a little bit.

And she said, "Okay, so what have you been doing?"

I thought, "What are you talking about?

"Here's this amazing thing we did.

We handed out these newsletters."

But for her, that wasn't enough.

What are we actually going to do?

They sort of broke down organizing into simple steps.

I need to get from, "We want a better deal at the office," to, "Okay, here's what we're gonna do tomorrow."

It was a real turning point for me.

I thought, "I've got my feet on the ground, and we're gonna really be able to do something."

We got an office in the YWCA, and it was this tiny, packed thing where we had several desks all squeezed into a teensy little office.

[phone rings] - At the time, I was an office worker.

So I sought them out.

And I remember going down the hallway.

It was one of those doors with, you know, sort of a glass pane with ripples in it so you couldn't quite see through.

That was 9to5.

It seemed kind of small.

Karen and Ellen were very busy.

There was a sense of it being a big deal.

I was like, "Yeah."

I think I was probably a little intimidated, but they did need help.

I knew the score, in terms of office work, and--and I was ready to organize.

I did start reading voraciously about why society was the way it was, and it was like being bit by a bug.

A lot of things that I didn't understand fell into place.

I wanted to have a voice.

I wanted to have more power.

- 9to5 represented this explosion in consciousness.

Women had been on a path up through the '50s and into the '60s.

- Ohh... - There were many times she was glad that her college training had prepared her so well for home life.

- If you could do one thing for me... - What?

- Try to do something about your coffee.

- Every woman needs to be herself at times.

Your answer?

Baking.

- I am the first one to agree that women should have all the rights they want, as long as they stay in their place.

[laughter] - By the late '60s and early '70s, all the expectations changed.

Women entered the workforce, new technology, the pill... [laughs] You know, all of these different things were beginning to change women's roles in their families and relationship to men.

- What was new in the 1970s is how many women were coming into the workforce quickly.

12 million more women were in the workforce by the end of the 1970s than in the beginning.

That's a huge influx of women.

And at the same time, there's women in the streets demanding their rights.

[women chanting indistinctly] - On the sidewalk, please.

On the sidewalk.

- We were in the midst of the women's liberation movement.

It was a convergence of two historical rivers: women pouring into the workforce, and of the forces of women's liberation.

Both of these rivers come together, and they set the stage for 9to5.

- What do we want?

[cars honking] all: Equal rights!

- There was all this new stuff in the air.

There was this understanding that we had gotten that it applied to the office.

- I've had several job interviews where people told me that if I were a man... [chuckling] I could have the job.

- There's a lot of women that are really doing men's work, and I really do believe that they should have the equal rights and the equal pay that a man does receive.

- When we walked in with 9to5 to say, "You know what, this isn't right.

There's something you can do about it," everything exploded.

- We called our first public meeting in downtown Boston.

[cheers and applause] If we don't fight for dignity and respect on the job, who's gonna make-- who's gonna fight for us?

150 women showed up.

I was very nervous.

I thought, "Oh, my gosh.

What are you gonna do with all these women?"

So we started committees.

We're giving new people an opportunity to take more responsibility and have an impact.

We were shocked to discover that, in fact, we were the largest sector of the workforce.

The typical worker at that time was thought to be a man in a hard hat.

Well, actually, there were more women office workers than there were construction workers, manufacturing workers.

There were 20 million women office workers, and we didn't exist.

So we would go out in front of a workplace in the morning as women are going into work, with a survey about what's your job like?

And if you tell us, we're gonna tell the whole city.

- I loved surveying.

Amazing how many office workers returned surveys.

Women wanted to be heard.

- Getting someone to fill out a survey and getting under their skin, it's this whole transference of complaining to your friend and instead complaining through an organization.

Everybody's got a beef, but how do you channel it in a way that could ever have power?

- We had discovered that there were secret boss organizations.

Something called the Boston Survey Group met and set wages across the board across many different corporations for office workers.

- This was illegal.

It's like price fixing.

We started leafletting about it at the big insurance companies and the big banks, and it was very embarrassing for them.

- That led to a 10% across the board pay increase and a job posting program-- victories that were very concrete.

A big lesson for our members, and we made this very explicit, is, "Your boss is organized.

You better be organized too."

- When the secretaries rose up through 9to5, it's almost like the wallpaper came alive.

People did not understand that secretaries had this kind of power and could demand this kind of respect.

It was shocking.

- There's no reason in the world why you can't regulate your own life, why you can't have good wages, good jobs, and good opportunities.

And if you don't organize, you're not gonna get it, because there's not one management person in the whole world that's gonna come forward and say, "We're gonna give this to you 'cause we're swell Joes."

- Our grievances led us to create the Office Workers Bill of Rights.

[lively music] [applause] - Nine: the right to benefits equal to those of men in similar job categories.

- Yes!

[cheers and applause] - Armed with a sound truck and a voice to protest, the women of 9to5 gathered first at Government Center and then at Copley Square.

– Ten: the right to equal access to promotion opportunities and on-the-job training programs.

[cheers and applause] 11: the freedom to choose one's lifestyle and to participate... - What do you think of this whole business?

- A lot of this is-- I don't know, making sounds, making noise.

- The girls I think have got it over the guys.

They get everything paid for and everything else.

I don't see what they're really...arguing about.

I think they have just as many rights as guys have.

[applause] - Boston has the third-lowest pay scale for clerical workers of the 15 largest cities in the United States.

And then also things like doing personal errands for the bosses, uh, getting coffee, doing... writing personal letters, things like that, when that's not what we get hired for.

- We deserve better promotion and training opportunities.

- The point that secretaries as working people might have legitimate labor grievances is not a new one.

What is new is the particular forum for dissent.

It's not the disembodied voice of the amorphous feminist movement.

It's this city's secretaries, talking about this city's secretaries' problems.

- It just seemed like, "Wow, we are catching a wave here."

- How long will you continue this fight?

- As long as is necessary.

- One way that you could tell you're a part of a movement is that there was a certain spontaneity to... other beginning organizations popping up.

We were contacted by people all over that wanted to know what we were doing... women who wanted to start organizations like ours.

- There was a whole working women's movement, lots of organizations-- 9to5 was part of this.

These were taking off-- it was kind of like a brush fire.

- Some bosses regard their secretaries as office wives who should be as willing to make coffee as take a memo.

But in Chicago today, some of the office wives said they want to divorce.

- We know secretaries are professionals, and as professionals, their job description does not include making coffee.

- The Coffee Rebellion was on.

Members of a Chicago group called Women Employed support their newfound heroine, a secretary who won't make coffee for the office's 13 lawyers.

[women chanting indistinctly] chanting: You must obey the law.

- There are many jobs that females would be qualified for, but they're discouraged from applying for them because they specifically are advertised under male columns.

The opportunities are not equal for men and women.

- What do you say to those charges that that kind of segregation violates the Civil Rights Act?

- [laughs] [women singing] - We will solve this exploitation - You're trespassing.

- No, we're not, sir.

- You are trespassing.

If you come into my office, you're trespassing.

- Okay, are you Mr. Fred Levinson?

- No, I'm not.

- And who are you, sir?

- I--that's irrelevant.

I am not gonna talk with you.

- We're here to see Mr. Levinson... - I'm not going to deal with you.

- To inform you of your illegal application form which violates state law.

- We talked a lot about 9to5 going national.

We believed we were gonna transform the labor movement.

- 9to5 did go national.

They consolidated a lot of the groups.

They brought everybody in and then sort of became the umbrella.

- The survey was compiled last fall by a group called Atlanta Working Women.

More than half of the women surveyed earned less than $12,000 a year.

And for most, respect is something they rarely get.

- I certainly had an affinity for women's problems.

I thought, well, you mean I can actually work to help people solve their problems, help women solve their problems at work and--and improve work life?

And I thought that was the dream.

- Okay, now you're gonna organize clerical workers.

That means you have to dress like a clerical worker.

You have to put on a dress.

You have to shave your legs.

You have to wear pantyhose.

And I had to think about it.

"Do I really want to do this?

"Okay, I'll shave my legs for this job--for the cause.

I'll shave my legs for the cause."

So I did.

My first day, my first clerical worker I went to talk to, I walk into her office.

She's wearing fatigues.

And I'm thinking, I shaved my legs for this?

[laughing] [interviewer laughing] - I saw this flyer in the ladies' room wall for Cleveland Women Working, and I went to my first meeting.

- We believe in equal employment opportunity for women and minorities... [applause] Something long overlooked by the previous administration.

[upbeat music] - I come from a very traditional Chinese household.

Back then, there was nobody who looked like me in Cleveland.

I would talk to my parents about wanting to be part of the professional workforce.

And my mother said, "Well, that's just crazy.

Who's gonna take care of the household?"

And so of course I rebelled against her.

I was always in trouble.

[chuckling] Outreach for Cleveland Women Working meant flyering at the bus terminals.

Bus stops, retail politics.

My favorite thing.

I still do it today.

- In the 1970s, labor organizers, in order to organize a workplace, a lot of times what they'd do is they'd stand out on the plant gates and pass out leaflets.

What the women of 9to5 were doing was very different.

They started with what was personal.

They were holding nurturing lunches with women.

- You weren't being a good organizer if you didn't have-- we had, you know, like, three lunches a day, for Christ's sakes.

- Women would say things like, "I really can't talk to you.

I need to ask my husband for permission."

- The premise was not only to fight for employment rights but to help women develop themselves and develop their leadership.

- I always credit Verna Barksdale.

She was a absolute leader in 9to5.

When she invited you to a meeting, she asked you to bring something--chips, cookies-- 'cause then you were committed to come.

She would always pair a Black person and a white person together or a younger person and older person, and that helped form relationships within the organization.

We met with the Boston chapter, and they were having issues in recruiting Black women, so Verna said, "Well, do you eat lunch with them?

Do you live near them?

Do you socialize in any manner with them?"

And the answer was, "No.

No.

No."

When nobody believes that you want to help them or when you don't talk to them anytime, you don't ask them to lunch, you don't live near them, their children don't play with your children-- Atlanta was a little different.

- We would take people where they were... maybe they're not ready to chair a meeting yet, but maybe they could stand up and make a little report.

- Good writers, you say, "Would you like to try writing?"

Good spokespeople, you say, "Would you speak at the press event next week?"

- Most of the women would say, "I can't speak in public.

I'm too shy.

I can't do this."

But we kind of knew you can, you know?

You can, given the right circumstances, you can and you would.

- For a lot of people, giving a speech might one of the more terrifying things that you ever have to do in your lifetime.

We all had to.

- I remember the first time I had to speak was National Secretaries Day.

There was maybe 500 people.

There was gonna be lots of TV.

The morning of, I was so nervous.

I worked on this speech-- worked on it and worked on it.

The director looks at my thing and she goes, "Oh, this is great."

And then she starts editing it in the cab on the way there, and I thought I was really just gonna die.

I just thought, "I can't do this."

And in fact, I did.

- Women went from zero to a thousand in a matter of months.

It was so exciting to see people who hadn't thought of themselves as being able to take a public role...be speaking.

- People who were doing rote clerical work where their boss certainly doesn't know or appreciate or care about all those hidden talents, if they can come to an organization where those things are found and nurtured and useful, it's really powerful, and it makes you want to keep coming back.

- We built an organization that we wanted to be in.

We were organizing a workforce that was 90% female, and so our staff and our leaders were 90% female.

Half of us were single mothers.

So we had our babies and we were still organizers.

- The women who were part of 9to5, they built their own kind of feminism.

It was a workplace feminism, and it was powerful.

- Susie, what beautiful flowers.

Secret admirer?

- My boss.

- Your boss?

- For National Secretaries Week.

What did your boss get you?

- Well, Mr. Gladstone's very busy.

- Excuse me, are you Mirna Camby?

- Uh-huh.

- These are for you.

- For me?

Oh.

- Ooh.

- We feel roses one day in April are no substitute for our rights 365 days a year.

- Women in Cleveland Women Working considered themselves mainstream women, didn't believe that they were feminists, but yet, if you asked them what they believed in, they believed in all the same things feminists believed in.

And so we couldn't have a demonstration, because a demonstration is considered too radical for our members.

So we would have actions.

- 9to5 meeting on Tuesday.

- Thanks.

- 9to5 meeting on Tuesday.

- Thank you.

- You know, what we're doing is pretty serious, but seriousness isn't always what gets the message across.

- 9to5 had a contest to find out who was the Worst Boss, Bad Boss, Unbelievable Boss.

Bruce, you won the Downright Unbelievable Boss.

You're his secretary, Kathy?

- Yes.

- You had to go to a beef and beer restaurant.

- Uh-huh.

- And if you found a girl there that you thought he would be interested in, you-- - I would have to beep him.

Yeah.

[laughter] - Well, who's got the first question?

[laughter] - The best one was the 14-Karat Boss.

- Right.

- And that was fabulous.

- Here with us is Debbie Neal.

- I remember her.

- Tell us about the winner-- the notorious winner, we might say, Debbie?

- Yes, the winner of the 14-Karat Award was a senior partner in the firm of Kelley, McCann and Livingstone.

He requested his secretary to, every single day, buy carrots, peel them, put them in the refrigerator.

- Well, Wilma, that's fantastic.

- You see that boss's nose twitching?

- That's the best thing that could happen to you, isn't it?

- Oh, sure.

- I mean, you can publicly embarrass bosses who provoke or who demand demeaning tasks on the part of their secretaries.

- That's right, because the public knows that it's ridiculous.

- The boss who made his secretary sew up his pants while had them on... - Like, in the crotch.

- How many times you sew up my slacks?

- Once.

[giggles] - That's not bad.

Once in five years?

- Does this embarrass you being on TV like this?

- No.

I love it.

- Well, today that would be considered sexual harassment.

- Uh, yes.

- Yeah.

- I want to know who called you for this.

- It wasn't me.

Don't look at me.

- This image of him claiming his property and having his props on either side of him-- [poignant music] It makes her have to play the role that he wants her to play.

Subservient.

- I remember one time I went to this job interview.

Ooh!

He interviewed me in this secluded room.

I don't even know if it was a real office.

And he just, you know, said I would have to date him.

- No, he didn't use the word "date."

- He said, "Sleep with me, or you're out."

- Just like that.

- Touching me any way that he could at any time, rubbing my back, running his hands along my legs.

- Wouldn't be a sin for us to see your legs.

If you pull your waist in a little bit, you might look like a woman.

- Is that all, Mr. Draper?

- Hey.

I'm not done here.

I'm working my way up.

- Sexual harassment was happening, but there wasn't a language for it.

And in fact, the term "sexual harassment" didn't emerge until the '70s.

- There are 42 million women in the workforce now, and in some cases that's led to a new version of sex discrimination.

It's called sexual harassment.

- The scene has always been written for laughs in the movies... - [gasps] - The secretary trying to escape the passions of her lustful boss.

- Aah!

- I say, knock, girl, knock!

- Uh--sorry.

- But to women workers in real life, it's not funny.

[somber music] - I was leaning against a railing, and he walked by and slapped me on my behind and said, "Nice ass," in front of members, in front of coworkers.

- The day before a holiday, people would bring liquor in.

They brought out the cake, which was two women's breasts, um, on top of it.

And as they were cutting it, they would make comments-- the men would make comments about cutting into this... fresh meat.

[laughter] I was getting ready to report that I was feeling harassed, and then somebody came up to me and said, "Little lady, I don't think you should think about talking here."

- I was basically told that there's nothing that's going to happen here.

You're gonna have to deal with it.

- I remember taking one young woman out to lunch and, you know, talking about her job and how we could help her.

And all of a sudden, her face drops, and she starts crying.

I said, "What's going on?"

And she started telling me her boss had attacked her recently.

I sent her to the Rape Crisis Center, and then I referred her to a lawyer.

- Yes.

By her boss.

- 52% of the women surveyed are reporting that they have either quit a job or been fired at some time in their working lives because of male sexual harassment on the job.

- It was something that we were aware of and really tried to bring out in the open, but in a safe way.

- Ellen Bravo is coauthor of a new book, "The 9to5 Guide to Combating Sexual Harassment."

- The book went through what are the laws that protect you against unwanted sexual attention on the job and what you can do about it.

- Sexual harassment.

Surprising?

No.

It happens to one out of every two women.

Don't take it.

For answers on sexual harassment, call the 9to5 Hotline.

- We had a call from a woman who said, "I just wanted to let you know "what happened with my supervisor.

"The next time he came up to me and tried to--funny business, "I said to him, 'I've registered your name "'with a national women's organization, so you better watch out.'"

And she said, "And he hasn't touched me since."

- I-I would like to know why the last associate producer before me made $50 a week more than I do.

- Oh, because he was a man.

[somber chords] - Fact: employed women are paid 59 cents for every dollar employed men are paid.

- We had heard of women in the banking industry being passed up for promotions and men with the same skills being paid 50% more.

- That's when we really began learning more about the laws that prohibit discrimination.

We weren't really aware of those laws, and we did our research.

We learned everything about the law, and we used the law to our advantage.

- The meeting here today is really just step number one.

- Yes.

It'll be the first meeting of many.

- We have investigations going on at the four largest banks in Cleveland right now.

The Department of Labor, there's a huge investigation going on of National City Bank.

- Businesses that got federal money had to comply with anti-discrimination laws.

You could have their money taken away.

- The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission just strengthens what we've been saying for the last two years, that banks are short-changing women.

- After our campaign, the women who worked in banks were much better off than they had been previously.

Many more women got promoted.

They hired many more people of color.

- At one of the banks, they won an average of a 12% raise within the first year.

At John Hancock Insurance, they won an average 10% raise.

And not only that, they got the company to give money to a local childcare center so that they would have childcare for their kids.

- Were they given full justice?

Probably not.

- National City Bank was just a blip.

But what it showed was that this was important and that we could win, and it was a message to everybody that we're here, we're in it for the long haul, and you're gonna be hearing from us.

- Bubbling beneath the surface of this expanding part of the workforce, 80% of which are women that are the lowest rung of the ladder of working people-- I'm talking about women office workers-- there is a...

I don't know if revolution is the word for it, but they're mad.

[cheers and applause] When the Vietnam War ended and I would run into Karen here and there, she would tell me stories about women office workers.

You know, they were jaw-dropping.

And so I started to think, "I should make a movie about this."

We went to the 9to5 office in Cleveland.

I think there were about 40 or 50 women.

- She said, "I'm gonna introduce you to Jane Fonda.

"And when you meet her, you just act casual and don't get excited."

She said, "Can you do that?"

[laughs] [laughter] I said, "Oh, yes, I can meet Jane Fonda."

So she took me up, and she said whatever she said, and she introduced-- I said... [screaming] "Jane Fonda!"

[laughter] - We went around, and each of them told us a little bit about who they were and what their experiences were on the job.

And then we asked the question: "Do any of you fantasize about killing your boss?"

- I'm thinking, "This is so typical Hollywood," you know?

But every single one of them had a fantasy about killing their boss.

- You know, one of them that was so far out we couldn't put it in the movie was... grinding him up in a coffee bean grinder and then making drip coffee out of him.

- I'm just sitting there-- can't believe my ears.

- It unlocked this idea for the movie.

The entire time that we were working on the movie, I could carry in my heart that this was married to a movement.

Today is the last day of the shooting of "9 to 5," and I'm very moved, because it's been the best, most wonderful experience that I've ever had.

And part of what's made it so wonderful is that even though it's a comedy, you will know that everything in that movie is based on things that were told to us by women like you.

Every fantasy--and the boss gets barbecued and eaten... [laughter, cheers, applause] Those fantasies came right out of Cleveland, women who work for National City Bank.

And then there was the day that Dolly showed up saying to me and Lily, "I've written a song, y'all.

Will you listen to it?"

And she started using her long nails like a washboard to keep time to herself.

And she started singing... Workin' 9 to 5 And Lily--I could see her hair standing up on her arms.

And I thought to myself, "The movement has an anthem."

[Dolly Parton's "9 to 5"] - Workin' 9 to 5 What a way to make a livin' Barely gettin' by It's all takin' and no givin' - Coffee, Violet?

- Yes, sir.

- "9 to 5" was one of the highest-grossing box office hits of the year.

- There were moments in it that I thought was just poignant moments that were just so real.

- I can't take much more of this.

Something, somewhere, sometime is going to snap.

- Office workers went to see it.

It was speaking right to them, and there had never been anything like this.

When Jane Fonda's there at the Xerox machine and the paper starts coming out, and more paper's coming out and more and more, women would stand up in the audience and say, "Hit the stop button!"

- You gave that promotion to Bob Enright instead of me?

I've got five years seniority over him.

- The concerns of office workers... - Get your scummy hands off of me.

- Were right up there on the screen.

[playful music] - The fact that it was a comedy helped it.

- Not as a didactic film about what's wrong and these people are victims, but instead, it's a farce.

- Your coffee, Mr. Hart.

- By making it a farce, it leapfrogs the debate.

It doesn't have to prove there's discrimination.

It just says, "This is ridiculous."

[cheers and applause] So this outrageous movie moves 20 million office workers to, "This is crazy; I'm not gonna put up with this anymore."

- What the movie does show is when you organize and join together, you can have tremendous power.

We traveled around the country with the movie, and we would have fundraisers.

- She resonated with women and helped build the credibility of the organization.

- Everybody knew our name.

We just knew that this was enormous, that our organization's name was way out there.

- The ideas we were talking about were becoming mainstream.

Opinion leaders of our country were talking about this.

We had made it to the big time.

But still, people were constantly calling our office saying, "My boss just fired me.

I'm out on the street.

If just happened.

What can I do?"

And we didn't have any answers for them.

People needed something more powerful than an ad hoc organization of working women.

- We'd go and we'd confront an employer and they'd say, "We'll get back to you," and we'd think to ourselves, there should be a law that forces employers-- if workers come and make demands, there should be a law that they have to get back to you.

And then we thought, "Oh, there is a law.

It's called the National Labor Relations Act."

- The National Labor Relations Act is now the law of the land.

- It provides supervised union elections to enforce the rights of labor.

- That made us realize, "Oh, yeah, we should be a union."

- If the boss gets in the way We're gonna roll right over him We're gonna roll the union on We're gonna roll We're gonna roll We're gonna roll the union on We're gonna roll We're gonna roll We're gonna roll the union on If the goons get in the way... - We had built a women's organization, but now we had to learn how to build a union.

[upbeat percussive music] - It starts quite naturally with a group of workers talking to each other about things that seem unfair on the job and deciding that they actually wanna make a change.

They decide that they want to organize with each other, and normally, they'll reach out to a already existing union who's got the know-how and the resources to back the group up.

There's unions all over the country for different kinds of jobs.

Once we get a majority of workers to support the union, we go to the labor board to set up an election.

If we win the vote, a new chapter of the union is formed.

- If you have a union, the employer is required by law to sit down and negotiate a contract with you covering wages, working conditions, and benefits.

- I wasn't interested in working in unions as I knew them.

I really wasn't.

I had seen my mother be in a union that was run by men, that was controlled by men, and I had seen her problems even as trying to be a woman active in her union.

She wasn't respected at all.

Sexual harassment, personal harassment for being a woman for trying to sort of do a man's job.

I was a feminist.

I wanted to be in a women's organization.

But I knew that unions provided sort of the structure and the tools that you needed to make change in the workplace.

I was interested in creating a union by and for women.

- So we talked to ten different unions, and some were clueless where they said, "Oh, you know, we'd do more organizing here "if I could just get a girl in to answer the phones more often."

[light music] - You didn't feel like you were sitting with somebody who considered you their equal.

It's just like, "You little girls," patting on the head kind of attitude.

- You know, they would say things like, "You don't know what you're talking about."

"You're all too young and green to really know what it means to be in a union."

- Were you?

- Were we young and green?

Yes.

[laughs] Yes!

We were very young and green.

- A lot of the meetings were with these older, paunchy guys.

So some of it was crude jokes about women and little ass-pinching here and there.

- Well, did Karen tell you about-- - One union said, "Well, you can't organize women 'cause they think with their [bleep], not their brains."

- They actually said that?

- Yes.

- So you weren't gonna... you know.

[both laughing] - We didn't think that would be a home for us.

- In the end, Service Employees, SEIU, kind of came out on top.

They seemed to appreciate these women are onto something.

- Other unions wanted them, but nobody would give them the kind of independence and autonomy that SEIU did.

But now, they had to negotiate for that.

9to5's organizers are gonna be paid the same as the male organizers.

That was a demand, that they would have their own officers and they would have control over their own budget.

That was revolutionary.

- Women organizing other women in support of a new union.

- Here's to better pay and dignity in 1982.

[overlapping chatter, laughter] - Fed up with low pay and bad benefits, they turned to a women's union for help.

- It's going to be our union, 9to5, that's going to make the changes in office after office after office.

- This union was gonna be run by women.

We were gonna organize women workers.

It was gonna change women's lives and it was gonna change the labor movement is absolutely what I believed.

- We were ascendant and feeling like we just could have the world.

We had come off of a decade of incredible activist energy, momentum, success.

We had no reason to believe that that arc would not continue.

- Do not want our lives to be run and our world changed by the militant women who are demanding what they call a gender-free society.

- American Women do not want to be called feminists.

Everything they stand for is bad and destructive.

- 'Cause I like my life the way it is.

- For now, the ERA is dead.

- We were going to go on a crusade across the nation and try to do away the homosexuals.

- Moral Majority is not a religious organization.

It's political.

- It's time for God's people to change America.

[applause] - This morning at 7:00 a.m., the union representing those who man America's air traffic control facilities called a strike.

They are in violation of the law, and if they do not report for work within 48 hours, they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated.

- Our timing couldn't have been worse.

- It's like birthing this beautiful baby in a toxic waste dump.

- But we so strongly believed that if we could get this thing lit, we could get the fires going, it was going to happen.

This was it.

There was not gonna be another chance like this.

- I was the first organizer in Cleveland, and we had to start from scratch, right?

We had no members.

[laughing] - A friend of mine, also from New York, and I called her and told her, "I'm moving to Cincinnati to work with the union."

And she was just like... you know, she just threw up her hands, just laughed.

"You're moving to Cincinnati, Ohio?"

- I remember saying, "I'm gonna be an organizer."

It was like, there's a job title?

There's a job title!

I get to be an organizer.

I became the very first person hired at District 95 in Seattle.

We had 3,000 clerical workers.

We put them on file cards, we clipped them together in bundles, and we'd go out and try to find people.

- Here I am, you know, answering the phone, and this person comes up and she says, "Oh, so you must be new.

Are you Rosalinda?"

And I said, "Well, Rosie.

I'm Rosie."

And she said, "Well, I'm Adair Dammann."

And I go, "Well, okay.

Nice to meet you."

- Debbie literally went to every single person's desk.

That was even, like... "There's somebody at my desk."

- She would walk right through a door that said "Authorized Staff Only."

She would go right... and get in there."

- People--yeah.

- "Allowed" in the labor movement is a funny word.

It's--we were allowed unless someone said "no."

- I wasn't really that interested in forming a union.

But management started these mandatory meetings that you had to come to, and they kindly explained to you what unions were all about, that they were all about getting your dues money and they would not come through for you.

Well, that infuriated me.

It infuriated me for management to tell me how to think about my own employment.

There's something up here.

It's like a light bulb went off.

"When are you meeting next?

I'm gonna be there."

- It was Inge who just kept asking me over and over and over again, you know?

She just never gave up.

"We're having a meeting tomorrow, you wanna go?"

- That's Inge.

- Most of the time I'd say, "No, thanks, but I'm with ya all the way."

- I remember the newsletters and the flyers from the union.

The more I read, the more it dawned on me, hey, this is my life they're talking about.

This is not just a union.

This is my life.

It was kind of scary when you first started organizing.

But it's--I tell you, it's scarier when you feel like you're all by yourself.

You're one individual against this whole big bureaucracy of the university.

- You had to be kind of quiet about it, or you probably could lose your job.

I knew no one who was ever involved with the union.

I was used to fighting my own battles and not getting very far.

So I thought, "What do I have to lose?"

- I worked at the corporate office, which I always called in The Big House, because that's where all the bosses-- the president of the college, the assistant, the-- the--everybody was there.

You could not talk about the union at all.

That was a no-no.

9to5 had a demonstration right outside.

[distant chanting] All my team of workers, they were all looking out the window, like... Management was listening, trying to see where everybody was at.

Management would fire you.

I had to figure out whether I was gonna go out or stay in.

I watched people get mistreated in that office and belittled, and... so I just felt like...

I'm not gonna just sit this out.

I just decided this is something I have to do.

And when I came back, I felt like I was Norma Rae.

They were like, "Yay!

All right!"

But they were doing it like in the corner, in the bathroom, or they'll come by my desk, like, "All right, Carol.

Like, all right."

So from that day on, I had a real interest in change.

I became an organizer.

- It was women representing the work I do.

Of course I'm going to get involved.

We ourselves should take the responsibility to have coffee, to talk with the new people and ask them, "Why aren't you a member?

And you should be a member."

Maybe it's in my DNA.

[laughs] I grew up in the Yakima Valley, and my parents were farmworkers.

I became very involved with the Gallo boycott, which United Farm Workers was having all across the country.

I felt that, you know, with what little experience I had, then this is one way to really build something.

- There were the feminists, who were the young ones, who were very instrumental in developing the union and bringing the union to the campus.

But the really militant women were the 55-year-old divorced women who would say, "I am not a feminist.

But it is not right that..." I came away saying that something that looks like a traditional union may not appeal to our community.

If we are building institutions of power, we need to let go of what we think they should look like and build them more organically.

- There were definitely racial barriers to overcome.

The Western camp was very, very white.

A lot of people were living out in that part of the county to get away from the inner city and to get away from the African-American population, is the truth of it.

9to5 was very aware of the challenges of uniting a diverse workforce.

We tried to deal with race issues straight on and always felt that was critical to have a diverse leadership.

- I was a union rep for all campuses, so I was not very well-received at West by the little housewives.

- They said everything except, "I want a white organizer."

You could feel it in the room.

It was tough.

They were hardcore "nos".

"I don't care.

My husband is management, "and I don't want to belong to a union, "and all you do is spend your money on the bad employees.

You don't do this.

You don't do that."

And I'm like, "Okay."

But I told them, "We're negotiating for all.

"You can't do it by yourself.

We're working-class.

You can't walk away from this.

You're gonna need it one day."

But if somebody was treated unfairly at the Western campus, who did they call?

- Even though we had challenges to overcome, we felt confident all the way through that vote.

- We were gonna just go for it.

- We were at the counting of the ballots.

We knew what was happening.

We were so on target.

You know, we had talked with everybody.

- And we were victorious.

[laughing] [funky music] - It was seen as a huge, huge victory.

And we had a party, and people from Western campus came to it.

- Wow.

both: "We are the power."

- Ooh, that's when we started getting, like, "Whoa."

- Wow.

- "Watch out."

To get people to put the button on, that was a huge action.

Like, then you would know, "Oh.

I don't know who she is."

- We have a secret handshake.

- "But she's got a button on."

It was like you were taking a stand and you were saying you know what you believed right then.

- Yeah.

- Their bosses ran a really hard anti-union campaign, sort of a classic anti-union campaign.

They threatened loss of benefits.

They did one-on-ones.

They did department meetings.

- Oh, boy.

It was a long haul.

It is a long process to organize a union.

We continued to build and build and build, always working towards the election.

- Before the election, I don't know that any of us slept.

- We had most of our committee there with us during the vote count.

You'd sit all day long watching them count these ballots.

- We were determined, and we knew it was gonna happen.

We were just that confident.

- I actually remember one woman who was counting, and she had tears coming down her eyes.

- Everybody was pretty sure we were gonna win.

So when we lost, um, you know, I'm there with all of these members, and we had to then cross the street and go to our supporters, who had already been partying for a while and tell them we had lost and we weren't getting the union now.

That was a very hard night.

[somber music] - We were just stunned.

We just couldn't believe that it didn't work.

- We had lost by 29 votes.

To lose by that little... And the amount of time that people had spent on this... - It was heartbreaking for everyone.

And we all just burst into tears.

- I just--I wasn't sure what the next step was.

[thunder rumbling] [horn honking] - People did feel discouraged in Cincinnati.

But we did keep organizing.

- They'd try to bring up issues.

They hung in there and just kept swinging.

- We would just go and keep trying and keep trying and send someone else to keep trying.

- Their bosses made some really bad changes to their working conditions, to their pay and their health benefits.

People realized that all the promises that they guys made were lies.

That helped.

I mean, it just re-energized people.

- Sometimes a bad boss is the best organizer.

- I know, I know, And that's why we said, "This is not the time to give up."

- The second vote, we didn't feel like this one was gonna be close.

- Yeah, we won big.

We won big.

[cheers and applause] - At that victory party, Debbie pulled all of us aside and said, "Now the hard work begins."

And we were like, "What?"

- There we were, bargaining our first contract.

And we say, "A union is simply a vehicle for achieving your goals.

What is it that you need here on this campus?"

Management, in a cost-cutting measure, had eliminated tampon machines from the campus.

So somebody on the bargaining team said, "We should bargain to have all the tampon machines replaced."

[light music] This was an awkward conversation.

And I'd say, "It's your union.

"You bargain about what you want.

I didn't make this up.

Let's do it."

You know, people used it against us.

"What kind of union are you that you're bargaining about tampon machines?"

- It wasn't like the number one issue.

Pay was clearly more important, but it drove them insane.

"Tampons in the bathrooms.

We need tampons in the bathrooms."

We had people who would knit while they were in the bargaining meetings, just drive these guys crazy.

- They finally said, "You can have 15 tampon machines, and you all can decide where they go."

- It took us almost 18 months to get a first contract.

They wanted to punish people for having formed this union.

I mean, they kept fighting the whole time.

- They hired a lawyer who specialized in bullying and obnoxious, sexist behavior as a tactic of negotiations.

- He was a--can I say it?

An ass[bleep].

He was a real ass[bleep].

And he was always into the drama.

I think they go to drama school.

And they're going back and forth.

And then all of a sudden, he flips the table and he says, "No."

- He lifted the table up and flipped it.

And stalked out.

- It scared me a little bit, but I'm like, you keep the poker face.

That's what we learn how to do is keep that poker face regardless of what's going on.

And I remember somebody was sitting next to me and she was like, "What do I do?

"We just sit here.

When Anne move, we move."

Do you remember that, Anne?

- No, I don't.

- You don't?

When he flipped that table and you all--they would always go toe-to-toe.

But she'd win.

- They weren't happy to have to deal with us, because this had never occurred before.

We were simply workers, you know, and they were totally in charge.

They thought they weren't in charge any longer.

- We had nowhere else to go in negotiations at that time.

- Right.

- They were just saying no to everything.

- Mm-hmm.

- So in order to move them off of their position that seemed set in stone, we had to take some direct action.

- We all went to work that day... - Mm-hmm.

- 'Cause we thought it would be more powerful to actually walk out.

- Mm-hmm.

- I mean, we were kind of nervous and worried and-- "Is everybody gonna come?"

- "Is it just gonna be me and you?"

- Yeah.

The whistle.

- 10:00, they blew whistles.

- That's right.

- People got up and started moving out of the buildings.

[whistles blowing, chatter] [rattling] - People made those cans with the beans in them.

I remember thinking, "We're gonna walk around with cans?"

They were so loud.

- Way more people came out to go on strike.

They just felt compelled.

It was way bigger than we ever imagined it was gonna be.

It was our day, and nothing was gonna stop it.

- In your office, the woman who never would have anything to do with it got up and came up with you, so everybody felt even stronger.

And it was a huge grass area.

And it was just full of office workers.

- Oh, my God.

- Like, what have we done?

- Yes.

And, like, "Oh, boy."

- I think a lot of people-- that was the highlight of their career.

- I agree.

- That time when they took action.

- It's hard to describe.

- It just changed everything.

- It changed everything.

- The rise of the union-busting industry was really peaking.

Anywhere 9to5 went, they came after us.

They just thought we had some kind of weird magic to get these secretaries to stand up, and they were just not gonna allow this.

- The entire corporate elite is deciding, "Unionization?

We're done with that."

- U.S. business was booming.

However, there's far more global competition.

The employers attack the one entity that has the power to make sure that workers get fair wages.

Well, that's a union.

And that's why employers attack existing unions, but they also close the door for workers to form new unions.

Employers began to bend and break the law at an entirely new level.

The number of unfair labor practice charges against employers in the 1970s doubles.

- Companies facing unionization are fighting back, calling in a team of management consultants to help battle the union.

- The company has succeeded to the point where some people have returned their cards and wrote in, because they're scared.

They're scared of losing their jobs.

- First, the dismal picture.

And it is dismal.

There has already been massive upheavals on assembly lines because of automation, and the office is next.

- Secretaries disappeared, and the advent particularly of computers as well as the complete transformation of the economy into a service economy really meant that there wasn't a workforce, as we thought of it, to organize.

- Things changed fast.

- I figured it out when I was at the international convention.

I heard that they wanted to merge the smaller unions into a larger local.

Didn't take me but a minute to figure it out.

We're getting ready to lose 9to5.

- On the larger, national scene, it was probably the right thing to do.

But it was really hard on our members.

- Movements lose sometimes, and we have to understand why.

We have this major opportunity for women and people of color to finally break through, and employers quashed it.

When we have losses, we have to say it, and it is sad.

[melancholy music] - District 925 ended in the rest of the country, but Local 925 would carry on here in Seattle.

We didn't lose the vision, the feminist goals of our organization.

We looked for the next fight to improve the lives of low-wage women workers.

- They care for our children but are paid less than parking lot attendants.

- What do we want?

all: Worthy wages.

- Most childcare workers earn wages at the poverty level.

Today, hundreds marched in downtown Seattle... - With childcare, 925 began truly organizing the workforce of the future.

[indistinct chanting] - Daycare workers say this movement is long overdue.

[cheering] - We watched these women build this union of 10,000 people and win big.

[cheers and applause] I think we made the most change in those women's economic condition that I had ever seen happen in my life in the labor moment in one contract.

- If you look at the story of the labor movement, in many ways the story is the rise of-- continued rise of women's activism in home care and restaurants jobs, health, education.

By the time I came in as a young working woman, the workplace was completely different than when Karen Nussbaum or Ellen Cassedy came in.

No one--not once--asked me to fetch him a cup of coffee, and no one ever called me his girl.

It just didn't happen.

- We changed the public debate about whether women were real workers or not, whether women had a-- should have aspirations to lead in the workforce.

- My mother thought that what I was doing was not respectable, that I had no right telling people how to run their businesses.

Many years later, I was going through old photographs with my mother and it turns out that she had kept all the newspaper clippings that I had appeared in, which really amazed me, because she didn't read newspapers.

She didn't read English.

And she still doesn't read English.

- I wanted women to say, "I can fight, and I'm gonna change the world while I do it."

'Cause I think my mom gave me that.

She inspired me.

She did change the world in her lifetime.

And I could only hope for that kind of a legacy.

- If you handle a problem or help an employee through a problem, you do it once or twice-- it's the jazz of it all.

I just--I always used to say all the time, it's the jazz.

It's the jazz of the winning...

Being able to help somebody else.

- Whatever job you do, it's about the dignity that you have as a person doing that work.

I'm not just a secretary.

I'm a secretary.

- There's so much work to be done.

[laughs] And women lead the way.

They always have, and they always will.

If you're not part of the status quo, then what have you got to lose?

So we'll always be braver.

- How did we know?

I mean, it's like, you make history-- you have no idea that you're doing something that-- is this gonna be relevant?

- Does this really matter?

- Yeah.

- It turns out-- - Well, yeah.

Actually, I always thought all of it mattered.

Every drop of the water... it all matters.

- The question I feel that I wrestle with all the time is, what happens to consciousness?

When people are ready to fight and they engage in the fight and then they don't win or they don't win everything, where does that go?

Is it gone?

Do you have to rebuild the whole thing?

Or does it stay underground and then emerge again?

I'm optimistic, because... there's still a heartbeat out there.

[overlapping chatter] [upbeat music] chanting: Fund our schools!

Fund our schools!

- We got folks that can't pay their rent.

We got folks that are trying to figure out how they're gonna buy food... - We don't receive any benefits.

- Nothing.

I don't have anything.

Nothing but a paycheck and a check stub.

- $7.25.

Yes.

All this time.

Not one raise, 10 cents, nothing.

- Oh, look, we can catch up!

chanting: Hold the burgers.

Hold the fries.

We want our wages super-sized!

Hold the burgers.

Hold the fries.

- I see signs of hope in those fast food workers and childcare workers.

They're beginning to work together.

They are taking direct action to change their lives.

And people notice.

- I have a right to fight for what's right.

all chanting: We are unstoppable.

Another world is possible.

- Young people have new issues and new approaches, but fundamental workers' rights is not going away.

And life is about trying.

- Workin' 9 to 5 What a way to make a livin' Barely gettin' by It's all takin' and no givin' They just use your mind And they never give you credit It's enough to drive you Crazy if you let it 9 to 5, For service and devotion You would think that I Would deserve a fair promotion Want to move ahead But the boss won't seem to let me I swear sometimes That man is out to get me 9 to 5 What a way to make a livin' Barely gettin' by It's all takin' and no givin' They just use your mind And they never give you credit It's enough to drive you Crazy if you let it 9 to 5, yeah For service and devotion