The Working Woman’s Wish List: Bread <i> and </i> Roses : Secretaries: Office workers want higher pay, safer conditions and flexible policies that honor their connections to their families.

Wednesday is National Secretaries Day. In the quaint old days before the women’s movement, bosses used to reward loyal clerical workers with an annual gift of flowers or a bottle of cheap perfume. Now clerical workers often use the occasion to demand better ergonomic workstations, more flexible hours and higher salaries.

The rising militancy of clerical workers has its roots in 9 to 5, Assn. of Working Women, an organization founded in 1973 with the modest goal of expanding women’s rights in the workplace. (The organization inspired the zany film “9 to 5,” in which Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda popularized women’s solutions to office problems.)

Today, 9 to 5 is the leading organization for the nation’s 20 million office workers. To celebrate National Secretary’s Day, they sponsor a National Boss Contest. This year, more than a 1,000 office workers submitted stories to compete for “The Good,” “The Bad” and “The Downright Unbelievable.” The following was among the “Downright Unbelievable” submissions: “My department assigned me a new office space--an unused restroom. I spent seven months working . . . typing while seated on the commode. Every time someone flushed the toilet in the adjoining restroom, my seat/chair gurgled. I received an unsatisfactory evaluation for keeping an untidy work area.”

The organization has had considerable success in pushing working women’s problems onto the political agenda. They publicized the ubiquity of sexual harassment; they exposed clerical workers’ subsistence wages; they proposed more flexible hours and safer working conditions, and they clarified job descriptions, giving millions of women the courage to refuse to perform such wifely tasks as making the coffee or shopping for the boss’ Christmas gifts.

Most important, they exposed sex discrimination by comparing women’s skilled work and low salaries with the higher wages of unskilled male laborers. As a result, the idea of “equal pay for equal work,” which did not address the fact that men and women mostly work in different jobs, was replaced by the demand for salaries tied to the “comparable worth” of work.

Since May, 1989, 9 to 5 has maintained a toll-free Job Survival Problem Hotline. During the busiest month, 13,000 office workers jammed the phones. The majority of callers are women who work in offices, chiefly in the private sector. Daily problems such as lack of respect, low pay, stress and inadequate child care are so pervasive that many women don’t even mention them. It is when a crisis hits that they punch up the hot line, 800-522-0925.

A report recently issued by 9 to 5 dramatizes some of the nightmares of office workers. Pregnancy top the list, reflecting our society’s indifference to working mothers. When office workers become pregnant or take maternity leave, their jobs are sometimes threatened. Many women also report incidents of sexual harassment that endanger their livelihoods. Still others describe lack of health insurance, computer monitoring of their conversation and work and racist discrimination. A few examples from the trenches:

--Sharon, an administrative aide in a small firm, was constantly propositioned by the owner’s son. He repeatedly called her at home and screamed at her when she turned him down. While on vacation, the company left a message on her answering machine saying she was fired.

--On her second week of maternity leave, Karen, a secretary, received a letter from her employer announcing her resignation.

--Rose, a chemical-production worker, has found pornographic pictures left at her workstation and been the brunt of dirty jokes. The union steward will not forward her grievances about sexual harassment because he is one of the harassers.

--After eight years as a computer specialist, Lenora filed sexual-harassment charges against her boss with the state Civil Rights Commission. She was fired for sabotaging the computer system, her unemployment was denied and she is now on general relief.

Flowers and perfume are a lovely way to express appreciation for a job well done. But by themselves, they are no longer sufficient. Secretaries are not surrogate wives, they are workers. What most office workers want are higher salaries, safer working conditions and flexible policies that honor their connections to their families.

In 1912, striking women workers in Lawrence, Mass., carried a banner demanding “Bread and Roses.” It is a chant worth resurrecting on National Secretaries Day.