Excerpt from Salon
"9to5: The Story of A Movement," directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert — who previously spoke to Salon about their Oscar-winning documentary "American Factory" — recounts how women office workers, starting in the early 1970s, fought for equal pay, equal rights, and respect. Female office workers were generally asked for fetch coffee, run errands, and write letters for their male bosses — all responsibilities that would fall outside their job descriptions if they even had one.
Even worse, women workers were frequently subjected to racial discrimination, sexual harassment, and could be fired for getting pregnant. They had little or no health care benefits. If they had a problem with a boss, they had nowhere to go. Moreover, even if complaints were heard, nothing changed.
Bognar and Reichert's film generates both righteous anger and optimism as it tells the story of the women who fought for change. Karen Nussbaum and Ellen Cassedy were the co-founders of "9to5," an organization that published a newsletter for women office workers in Boston. They fought for health care, promotions, and respect, but had little success outside of generating interest from other female office workers. Then they really organized and became empowered. They started having concrete victories with wages and developed an "office workers' Bill of Rights." 9to5 eventually went national, and even unionized, transforming the labor movement. As they became District 925, they had another series of heartbreaking setbacks and successes.
"9to5" chronicles this movement's history, one that inspired the Jane Fonda-Lily Tomlin-Dolly Parton film and its theme song that became the women office worker's anthem. Fonda herself appears in the documentary and recounts her need to make the hit comedy after hearing stories of women office workers being demeaned.
Salon spoke with Julia Reichert about their new documentary, which will screen as part of AFI DOCS on June 19.
