An Advocate for Working Women : Profile: Karen Nussbaum helped found the national organization 9to5 and was tapped to continue her activism in the Clinton Administration.

The seeds of activism were planted in Karen Nussbaum’s psyche early in life.

As a youngster she saw a film about Ira Hayes, the Native American who helped raise the flag on Iwo Jima during World War II. When he returned home, discrimination and alcoholism plagued him, and he died in anonymity.

The notion that someone could contribute so much to a nation yet die so sorrowfully because of his ethnic background moved Nussbaum. She wanted to help people improve their lives.

So when Nussbaum grew up, she became an advocate for others, particularly working women. She helped found 9to5, the national group that campaigns for working women’s rights, and also helped establish a union for clerical and professional workers.

At age 44, Nussbaum is as passionate as ever. But now her activism is channeled through the Clinton Administration, where she is director of the Women’s Bureau, an agency within the Labor Department concerned with women’s employment issues.

“My life’s work is to work with working women,” she said in a recent interview.

From her corner office with a picture-perfect view of the Mall and National Gallery of Art, the slight woman with a steady gaze said she never had any particular ambition that led her to Washington.

But Labor Secretary Robert Reich said that in choosing Nussbaum to lead the Women’s Bureau, he hoped to send the message that working women count.

“Karen for years has been perhaps America’s strongest advocate on behalf of working women,” Reich said. “She blends strong advocacy with a marvelous sense of balance and humor.”

Ellen Bravo, who succeeded Nussbaum as head of 9to5, said one of Nussbaum’s strengths is that she sets clear, achievable goals.

“She’s very focused and very smart,” Bravo said. “She knows how to put the pressure on, but she knows what is winnable.”

Although the status of working women has improved significantly over the last 20 years, when Nussbaum began her role as an advocate, she said there is still much work to be done.

While 47% of workers are women, they earn only 75% of the salaries of their male colleagues, Labor Department data show. Nearly 80% of women earn less than $25,000 a year and they occupy only 2% to 3% of top management positions.

The Women’s Bureau was founded by Congress in 1920, the year women won the right to vote, with a mandate of promoting the welfare of wage-earning women in new industrial jobs. The first director of the bureau was Mary Anderson, a shoe factory worker and trade unionist who served until 1944.

The interpretation of the bureau’s mandate, however, has changed over the years, and the agency was notably silent during the past decade. Nussbaum, however, declines to criticize her predecessors.

As director, she hopes to promote the marriage of public policy and education.

“Unless we are reaching out to the public and know what working women care about, we won’t have good public policy,” Nussbaum said. “And unless you tell working women what their rights are it doesn’t matter how good the laws are.”

That was the thinking behind the bureau’s Working Women Count! questionnaire, a massive undertaking launched this summer.

The object of the survey is to ask the 58 million working women nationwide about their lives and conflicts. Nussbaum hopes the responses will form a base for future government policy.

More than 1,000 companies, newspapers and organizations are printing and distributing the questionnaire, which is also being made available on Prodigy, CompuServe and other computer networking services. Results are scheduled for release in mid-October.

To promote the survey, Nussbaum has traveled the country over the past year talking to women in a variety of jobs, from screenwriters in New York to casino workers in Las Vegas, construction workers in Cleveland and day-care workers in Kansas City.

She has been surprised, she said, by the similarity of the complaints. Women worry particularly about time and money, that they don’t have enough of either, and they worry about child and elder care.

“Women say they know what’s wrong, but don’t think they can do anything about it,” she said.

The bureau, she hopes, will help educate women about their options and rights under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, the Civil Rights Act and the Family and Medical Leave Act.

Nussbaum is a working mother of three children ages 6 to 11. Her husband is the political activist Ira Arlook, president of the advocacy group Citizen Action.

Born in 1950 in Chicago, Nussbaum was the daughter of liberal Democrat parents who she said taught her concern for the human condition.

Nussbaum’s father was a businessman, actor and director, and her mother was a public relations specialist and precinct committee chairwoman. Her family worked for civil rights and peace causes.

Turning 18 in 1968, when campuses and city streets were filled with demonstrations against the Vietnam War, was central to her development, Nussbaum said.

“I remember feeling tremendous relief that it wasn’t just a matter of doing good but that you actually could change the way things were,” she said.

After a year of study at the University of Chicago, Nussbaum moved to Boston, where she worked in a clerical job at Harvard University. The big issue for working women then, she said, was what she called the little indignities, such as who should fetch coffee for the boss.

Nussbaum recalled a day when she was assembling a loose-leaf binder, surrounded by piles of papers, when a male boss walked by and asked in a patronizing fashion, “Why aren’t you smiling, dear?”

Friends had worse experiences. A secretary told of pausing while typing a letter. Her boss asked what she was doing.

“I’m thinking,” she replied.

“Get back to work, you’re not paid to think,” was his response.

Perhaps the most succinct view of the condition of working women at the time came from one woman who wrote to Nussbaum’s group, “We will be called girls until the day we retire without a pension.”

Nussbaum and fellow workers called a meeting in the early 1970s to discuss their plight and decided to put out a newsletter for working women which they called 9to5. That newsletter, distributed at subway entrances before work, led to the formation in 1973 of Nussbaum’s group of the same name.

Now based in Cleveland, 9to5 has become a powerful and respected national voice for clerical and office workers. It inspired the 1981 film of the same name starring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton that told the tale of office workers who rebel against an abusive boss.

In 1981, Nussbaum helped found and became president of District 925 of the Service Employees International Union, which represents office and professional employees across the nation. She held that post until Reich asked her to join the Clinton Administration.