Working 9 to 5: A Women’s Movement, A Labor Union, and the Iconic Movie
Working 9 to 5: A Women’s Movement, A Labor Union, and the Iconic Movie by Ellen Cassedy (Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press, 2022)
We approached this book with a great deal of interest. Recently, women have been handed a major reversal of their rights – primarily, the right to control their own bodies. Much of the mission of the women’s movement that began in the mid-1960s and continued to make major changes for men and women and the culture was achieved. But so much remains to be done. Women are still a long way from achieving full equality, in the workplace and almost everywhere else.
The Foreword by Jane Fonda refers to a small yet significant act that symbolizes the situation for women working as secretaries when they began organizing for rights and respect on the job – making their bosses get their own coffee. Back in 1973 when two women had an idea about what needed to happen, this was standard practice. Gender-determined job descriptions were firmly in place when women were seen as the proper people to make coffee, or pick up dry-cleaning, and numerous other personal chores for the boss – the care-taking tasks that males were not required to perform.
The standard operating procedures in the nation’s offices provided the motivation for the movement that became 9 to 5 – the low wages, lowly status, the lack of respect and low ceilings, including “training men who would then go up the ladder past them, while they remained stuck on the lower rung … experiencing race, sex, and age discrimination.” As Fonda points out, “no business could run without them, and they knew it.” This was their secret power and they put it to good use. Fonda’s connection to this history, aside from her star power and the essential support she offered was the popular movie “9 to 5”, a brilliant approach to making the cause visible. As she wrote: “The movement built the movie, and the movie built the movement. That synergy was thrilling for all of us.”
But before all that, there were the thousands of small steps it took to move women out from behind their desks and into the streets. The book describes what it took to awaken thousands of women in individual offices and coalesce into an organization. Ellen Cassedy met Karen Nussbaum, the force behind this movement, in college and worked together to create change. One of the first steps was knowing that they needed more knowledge. Nusssbaum sent Cassedy out to attend the Midwest Academy, where she met Heather Booth, and started her journey to become a crackerjack organizer. The book lays out in detail the steps they took to create a mass movement. As Cassedy writes, typical approaches that had worked in the women’s movement – consciousness-raising circles, consensus strategizing – were discarded in favor of new techniques, “something different” to push ahead. Women slowly and then in greater numbers started coming out to forums, attending meetings, many for the first time in their lives.
The group adopted a “Bill of Rights for Women Office Workers,” while pushing ahead on specific battles. One such battle was a maternity benefits bill in Massachusetts, since pregnancy stood outside the coverage provided by most health insurance plans for sickness and disability. Their most significant foe was New England Telephone and Telegraph. Cassedy lays out the campaign to oppose the public utility, though ultimately losing the battle. But, as she notes: “Even though we ended up losing the maternity benefits fight … our organization had turned a corner. We’d paid attention to women’s reluctance to take action at their own workplaces, and we’d found ways around that constraint.”
As the group piled up wins, a crossroads was reached. “In our first two years, 9 to 5 had won more job improvements on an ad hoc basis than we had ever imagined possible. But right from the start, we felt certain that unions would be at least part of the solution for women’s problems in the office. Clerical workers who were members of a union were clearly better off: they earned an average of 32 percent more and had more say over their work lives.” Ultimately, 9 to 5 moved “to the next level – a more stable, more sustainable level.”
In 1975, the union option became part of the plan. But the contentious history of unions and women presented the group with a challenge. Cassedy describes their predicament, quoting George Meany (unfavorably), and statistics, such as the number of female members to the percentage of female union leaders. The search to find a union that would welcome the independent group that was seeking to maintain its autonomy – the right to make their own decisions; to hire their own organizers; and run their own organizing drives, proceeded.
The book has much to say about the obstacles and challenges they faced – in trying to build a multiracial organization; taking on the banking industry, and more. But, by 1978, when the organization celebrated its fifth anniversary, Senator Ted Kennedy, the keynote speaker, addressed a thousand women gathered at the Sheraton Hotel in Boston. Two announcements that day capture the spirit – one, that the group was filing a discrimination claim against a major insurance company, and two, a letter from Jane Fonda, with news that she was working on a new film, a comedy about office workers called “9 to 5”. As Cassedy writes: “The applause was deafening.”
Now, as workers at places like Starbucks, Trader Joe’s and Amazon seek to unionize, the lessons from the work described in this book are important. “If we organize, we can change the world,” wrote Heather Booth. “This book gives us a detailed and personal overview of how a determined group of women organized and achieved more than they ever imagined.” Ai-jen Poo, co-founder of the National Domestic Workers Alliance calls the book “history we can learn from and be inspired by. The women of 9 to 5 joined together for respect, recognition, and rights, paving the way for so many of today’s organizing efforts for economic and gender justice.”
Cassedy concludes with a strong last chapter, “Looking Back, Looking Ahead.” She looks at what was accomplished and what was not. She describes the reverses that the labor movement has experienced, and the factors that lead to the gender wage gap, including occupational segregation. In 2021, 71.8 percent of office workers were female; 28.2 percent were male. She includes the questions that must be answered if women workers are to successfully move ahead. And she concludes on a note of hope, with a quote about freedom—how “every generation’s got to win it again.”
Reviewed by Jane LaTour, the author of Sisters in the Brotherhoods: Working Women Organizing for Equality in New York City. LaTour is working to complete her second book, an oral history about rank-and-file reformers — activists in the cause of union democracy.