Still Hot Under the Pink Collar

My boss took a blind man and his Seeing Eye dog around the office to meet personnel. The man was introduced to management; the dog was introduced to the secretaries.

--Clerical worker at a Midwestern university.

Karen Nussbaum relishes repeating this story. Nussbaum heads 9 to 5, the National Assn. of Working Women, and the boss above is a winner this year in the “Downright Unbelievable” category in 9 to 5’s search for good and bad bosses.

The annual bosses-of-dishonor, who are singled out during this, National Secretaries Week, are not unique, says Nussbaum. Rather, she sees them as symptomatic of problems faced daily by women clericals, problems that have changed little since 1980, when Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton played pink-collar ghetto workers in the comedy hit, “9 to 5.”

Among these problems: sexual harassment, being bypassed for promotion in favor of men who “have families to support,” demeaning forms of address such as “you girls.”

Although 11 years have gone by, “the issues are very much the same,” Nussbaum says.

As executive director and co-founder of 9 to 5, Nussbaum was in Los Angeles last week to pick up a $50,000 check from the Gleitsman Foundation, founded by Alan Gleitsman of Malibu to encourage activism through an annual award recognizing those who initiate social change. (The other $50,000 went to Ann Wilson of Milwaukee, co-chair of National Jobs With Peace and lead organizer of Milwaukee Jobs With Peace.)

It was Fonda, a friend of Nussbaum since the peace movement, who presented her award in ceremonies at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Fonda lauded her as “a friend to all women who work in the United States.”

Appropriately, Fonda did it in memo form: “To Karen. From Jane. Congratulations and much love.”

In her acceptance speech, Nussbaum singled out one of last year’s winners of 9 to 5’s dubious achievement awards: “The beeper peeper” who sent his secretary out to cruise the local bar, with orders to beep him if she spotted a likely pickup.

Nussbaum’s awakening as an activist occurred in the early ‘70s, when, as a dropout from the University of Chicago, she was a clerk-typist at Harvard University. She often tells of a young man walking into her office one day, looking at her and asking: “Isn’t anyone here?”

In 1973, she and Harvard clerical Ellen Cassedy, joined by eight other Boston-area women, founded 9 to 5, now Cleveland-based.

The organization has 14,000 members and chapters in 20 cities, including Los Angeles. Its concerns include VDTs as health hazards, replacement of workers by machines, job stress, family-work issues and conditions for part-time and temporary employees.

Former Ohio Gov. Richard Celeste, who nominated Nussbaum for the Gleitsman Award and who came to Los Angeles to see her receive it, says he has followed 9 to 5 since its early days and finds it “wonderfully disruptive.”

Nussbaum is, indeed, a fighter. As a youngster, she had her social consciousness raised by seeing a film about Ira Hayes, the American Indian who was one of the Marines who raised the flag on Iwo Jima during World War II. Back home, Hayes fell victim to alcoholism and discrimination.

“I decided (that) when I grew up, I would try to help people,” Nussbaum says. At 40, she is continuing her fight for women who have “courage, anger and dignity.”

Nussbaum says the women she represents are the 80% of the female work force who earn less than $20,000 a year in nonprofessional jobs. “In these jobs,” she says, “not much has changed.”

Statistics compiled by 9 to 5 show that:

* 80% of clericals are female--one in four of the 56 million working women in America, compared to one in 18 men.

* More than 40% of clerical supervisors are male, up from 29% in 1979.

* The weekly paycheck of full-time women workers is only 70% of men’s, with median earnings of $328 a week.

* Between 1983 and 1988, 655,000 clericals lost their jobs.

With 50 million computer workstations in place, is the clerical an endangered species? Is Nussbaum in fact going to bat for a dinosaur?

“I don’t think so,” she says. Despite automation, clerical workers are “still the largest sector of the work force. I don’t see any serious decline in the next 30 years.”

The major issues for clerical workers, as she sees them, are pay, the pressure of combined work and family demands, and “the degradation of their work.”

Another concern is repetitive stress injury, which afflicts VDT users and others, such as grocery checkout clerks.

She thinks more attention needs to be paid to job design rather than to the design of machines. Why not a job mix, she asks, so no worker needs to be repeating the same steps all day long?

Another challenge to the clerical work force is that many jobs, such as data entry, have gone “offshore” to Jamaica, China and other places where labor is cheap.

Sexual harassment continues to be a major problem, says Nussbaum. “We get calls daily,” on the 9 to 5 hot line ((800) 522-0925), she says. “We’re stunned.”

In a single month, Nussbaum says, the hot line took 21 unrelated calls from women whose bosses had invited them to “a company party on the boat.” In all cases, it was to be a party of two.

The movie “9 to 5” marked “the ending of one period and the beginning of a new one,” Nussbaum believes. A decade ago, “no one assumed there was even discrimination in the workplace. It was every woman on her own. The movie said, ‘This stuff is ludicrous. If you put up with it, you’re a sap.’ ”

Nussbaum takes a less-than-executive salary of about $30,000 a year from 9 to 5’s $600,000 annual budget. Her husband, Ira Arlook, is also an activist, with Citizen Action, and they have three children.

At her office, clericals are part of the planning team. Nussbaum believes that the key to relieving job stress is to give workers more authority. Low control and high demand, she says, are “the deadliest combination.”

She has seen “an appalling retreat” by companies from job training programs for those below supervisory level. The attitude, Nussbaum says, seems to be, “ ‘these people can’t do anything, anyway.’ ”

Another concern is electronic snooping to monitor productivity. Most airline reservations clerks, Nussbaum says, are timed by a machine. One clerk said, to save time, she just hangs up “when anyone gets on the phone who has an accent or sounds old.”

Meanwhile, she says, part-time workers--with no benefits--are about 30% of the work force, most of them women.

And what progress there has been for women has not been across the board. A typical situation today, Nussbaum says, is that a partner in a law firm gets six months’ paid maternity leave, a secretary, six weeks, unpaid.

Still, she points to victories. “Working women’s issues are really very close to the top of the agenda now. We expect more. We don’t know how to get it yet, but we have reached the necessary precondition.”

‘Unbelievable’ Bosses

Winners, announced Tuesday in 9 to 5’s National Boss Contest, include these in the “Downright Unbelievable” category:

* My department assigned me a new office space--an unused restroom. I spent seven months working out of a makeshift office, 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.

--A Midwestern university employee

* I was granted a very substantial, responsible position upon my immediate supervisor’s death. I expected pay to coincide with the position. Wrong!! Since my husband works for the same company, I was told by my boss that I couldn’t make more money than my husband because it would cause friction in our family.

--An employee of a North Carolina landscaping firm

Runners-up included this nominee:

* My boss is downright nosy! I no longer carry a purse because he goes through it. I once caught him going through a customer’s checkbook. He stands out of sight behind our work stations and listens in on our phone conversations. . . .

--A beauty salon employee in Ohio