Working 9 to 5 in Boston, with Ellen Cassedy (episode 362)

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Transcript

Jake:
[0:03] Welcome to Hub History, where we go far beyond the freedom trail to share our favorite stories from the history of Boston, the Hub of the Universe.

Dolly’s Labor Inspiration

Jake:
[0:13] This is episode 362, Working 9 to 5 in Boston, with Ellen Cassedy. Hi, I’m Jake. This episode is inspired by Dolly Parton. I don’t think it’s a secret to longtime listeners that I’m a transplant to Boston. I first moved to Boston 29 years ago this fall, but I’m originally from deepest Appalachia. And us hillbillies, Stan Dolly, our Appalachian queen. She grew up poor in East Tennessee, and she never turned her back on her roots. After all the music and TV and movies made her rich, she didn’t take that fortune and go to L.A. or even really to Nashville. Instead, she built an empire at Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. And Dollywood brought good jobs and truckloads of tourism revenue to a historically impoverished area. Dolly stood by her queer friends, even in the darkest years of the Reagan administration when the official federal policy was to ignore AIDS and let queer people die.

Jake:
[1:18] She stood by her trans friends, even when her home state proposed hateful anti-trans legislation. Her imagination library bought books for over 3 million children, including the children of some of the friends that I grew up with back in the Hills and Hollers.

Jake:
[1:34] And in the darkest hours of the COVID pandemic, she donated a million dollars towards the research that eventually produced the Moderna vaccine. As far as I can tell, Dolly Parton was a genuinely good person.

Jake:
[1:49] After Dolly died last month, I put a lot of her hits into my Spotify playlist, including the song 9 to 5. At some point, I realized that I had never watched the movie 9 to 5, which may have arguably been Dolly Parton’s biggest role on the silver screen, where she starred opposite Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda.

Jake:
[2:09] Co-host Emerita Nikki and I sat down to watch the movie recently, and I cracked up. It’s a story about mistreated secretaries who accidentally make their fantasy of killing their abusive boss almost come true. Then they hold him hostage and start issuing memos in his name that end up transforming their workplace into a better place to work, with flexible hours, job sharing, on-site daycare, and lots of other amenities to make life easier for working women. What most fans don’t realize is that the song and the movie 9 to 5 were inspired by a real-life women’s labor movement that was founded in Boston in the early 1970s, which was also called 9 to 5. So tell us about the real 9 to 5. We’re about to meet Ellen Cassedy, one of the co-founders of the movement and the author of a memoir titled Working 9 to 5. We’ll discuss how secretaries in Boston organized themselves and other working women to demand better pay, upward mobility, and workplaces free of constant sexual harassment. And then we’ll look at how their movement inspired the movie.

Jake:
[3:22] But before we talk about the real 9-to-5 movement, I just want to pause and invite all of our listeners to help us celebrate the 10th anniversary of Hub History with our first-ever live episode. On the evening of Friday, November 13th, 2026, we’re going to gather at Old North Church on Salem Street in the North End for a conversation with Laurie Rogers Stokes and Jonathan Chu. Have you ever wondered how Massachusetts went from the stern Puritanism of Increase Mather to the hopeful liberalism of Mike Dukakis? We’ll call back to our very first episode from November 2016, which recalled the strange history of early Boston’s annual Pope’s Night, a wild November festival of misrule and anti-Catholic prejudice. And we’ll follow the evolution of the Commonwealth from the nation’s most conservative colony to its most progressive state. The event will be free, but registration is required by going to hubhistory.com slash live and filling out a quick form. Again, please come out for our first ever live podcast episode on November 13, 2026. More information and registration is available at hubhistory.com slash live.

Ellen Cassedy Joins In

Jake:
[4:41] I’m joined now by Ellen Cassedy. Ellen was one of the original founders of 9 to 5 in Boston, which she helped to create after getting frustrated with the everyday indignities of a career as a typist secretary at Harvard. Ellen wrote the book Working 9 to 5 about her life in the women’s labor movement. Ellen Cassedy is also a renowned Yiddish translator, a playwright, and the author of two previous books for working women. She’s also been a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News and a speechwriter in the Clinton administration. She now lives in New York City. But we won’t hold that against her. Ellen Cassedy, welcome to the show. Ellen Cassedy, welcome to the show.

Ellen Cassedy:
[5:27] Thanks for having me.

Jake:
[5:28] So I asked you here today to talk about your book, Working 9 to 5, and also the labor movement, which shares the name 9 to 5, and which you co-created while you worked at Harvard. Before we get into the movement itself, how did you come to work at Harvard? What was your job there? How old were you when you went to work at Harvard? Set the scene for our listeners.

Ellen Cassedy:
[5:52] It’s 1972. I’m 22 years old. It’s my first job out of college. I’m a clerk typist at Harvard University in the School of Education. Why was I working there? I needed the money.

Jake:
[6:03] Maybe you can help our listeners just envision the workplace. Was it a business office, an academic office? Was it individual offices, sort of the big open floor plan offices that so many of us work in today? What was the actual workplace like?

Ellen Cassedy:
[6:17] Part of it was open. Part of it was private little offices. There were several male bosses and a group of women who were their assistants. We had a supervisor. I had my own little office. It was near my male boss’s office. And one day he walked down the hall and came to my office, knocked on the door and said, Ellen, would you please remove the calendar from my wall? And then he returned back to his office and I followed him back down the hall, removed the calendar from his wall, went back to my office and thought, what was that? Why did he need me to do that? Why couldn’t he take the calendar off the wall himself? So that was just one of those little moments when you think, what’s going on here?

Jake:
[7:03] I read that in the book, and it seemed almost like a stand-in for just a whole series of everyday indignities. What was the woman office worker’s experience like in a Boston or Cambridge office in the 70s? Was that typical?

Ellen Cassedy:
[7:19] It was typical. And what about the time when a student walked into our office, looked around, looked one person right in the eye and said, isn’t anybody here? Well, I’m here. Can’t you see me? But you know, in those days, women office workers were pretty much invisible. When people pictured a worker, they tended to see a man with a hard hat wielding a wrench. And we were 20 million strong. We were one third of the female workforce, but people didn’t see us. And then all of a sudden, there we were. We were wearing our platform shoes and carrying our picket signs,

Ellen Cassedy:
[7:54] and no one had ever seen anything like that before.

From Typist to Organizer

Jake:
[7:56] Well, how did you make that leap from typist secretary to organizer? In the book, you describe spending evenings sitting in a circle on the floor with friends, brainstorming sort of how you could make work life better. But how do you get to that point? Where do those sessions happen? Who’s part of those discussions? How does that movement get born?

Ellen Cassedy:
[8:19] We started out gathering a group of our co-workers and on our lunch hour, we sat there and we talked about our jobs. Really, for the first time, we talked about low pay. We talked about unequal pay. We talked about training men to be our own supervisors and having to do favors, all kinds of favors for our bosses. And at that time, sexual harassment was perfectly legal. You could be fired for being pregnant. That was legal. And in the newspapers, there were two columns, help wanted male and help wanted female. To get from that point of those complaints, those problems, those grievances to actually starting an organization, well, we started with a newsletter. We stood in front of the tea stations in downtown Boston, and we handed out our first newsletter very proudly. And it said, every morning, We keep Boston’s offices running smoothly without us.

Ellen Cassedy:
[9:14] Everything would grind to a halt, yet we are underpaid and undervalued. And the response was tremendous. People would come up out of the subways and, grab the newspaper, and they would look at it, and they, oh, I’ve never seen anything like this before. People started writing to us with letters and, you know, sign me up. I want a subscription. And we were really onto something. But I think that to get from that newsletter to actually having an organization took our group deciding to send me to a school for organizers. Right then, in 1973, an organization was starting in Chicago called the Midwest Academy. And the idea was to train mostly women in the nuts and bolts of what it took to get an organization off the ground. And that meant how to call people on the phone, how to go talk to people in the park who were sitting there on their lunch hour, how to run a meeting. In those days, the only kind of meeting I knew about was from the anti-war movement where maybe 500 people would gather in a big room and raise their hand and somebody would be sort of chairing it and a decision would be reached somehow among all those hundreds of people. Well, we learned something different, how to prepare a meeting, how to help people speak up, how to prepare issues so that people can choose between options. And it was a very different kind of thing.

Ellen Cassedy:
[10:39] Our first forum, we passed out thousands and thousands of these pink flyers that invited people to come to a meeting at the Boston YWCA. And at that meeting, we had people stand up and talk about their experiences. But it wasn’t a place to make decisions, not yet. That came only later. So little things like that, the nuts and bolts of organizing, that’s what we learned at the Midwest Academy. And I brought that knowledge back to our group. And that’s how we got off the ground.

Jake:
[11:08] Who were you learning both alongside and from at the Midwest Academy? Who were your teachers and who were the other people or organizations who were learning to organize at that time?

Ellen Cassedy:
[11:18] The main teacher was Heather Booth, who continued and continues to have a lifelong life of activism. She was a very skilled teacher and very inspiring figure. And she had studied with the legendary Saul Alinsky, who was a veteran activist educator who helped communities all over the country to win improvements in their lives. She had learned from that, but you were not allowed to be a teacher at Saul Alinsky’s school if you were a woman. So she had to start her own school. And then the other main teacher was a man named Steve Max, who had been through the student movement, the anti-war movement. And he was also an excellent teacher. And they just nurtured all of us. Some of us were from the National Organization for Women. Some were from the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union. There were people from unions, mostly women. And I think I was probably the most green of everybody. I didn’t know much.

Jake:
[12:20] You describe in the book having some trepidation about sort of the group you were thrust into the midst of there.

Ellen Cassedy:
[12:25] I was used to being a pretty good student. But here I was doing these things that were really hard for me, like going door-to-door canvassing. Nowadays, I’ve done hours and hours and hours of that. But at the time, just knocking on someone’s door, ringing the doorbell. And here’s a stranger at the door. What do you say? How do you sort of organize yourself? That was very educational for me. And I learned a lot.

Jake:
[12:50] And it sounds like you also got practical feedback. What kind of feedback did you get on your work?

Ellen Cassedy:
[12:57] Well, I brought a pile of our fantastic newsletter to the Midwest Academy School for Organizers. And Heather Booth sat down. She looked at it. She sort of flipped through it. She said, hmm, good. Now, what are you doing? I thought, what do you mean, what are we doing? Look at this wonderful newsletter that we produced. And she said, well, how is that actually changing things? How are you actually engaging the enemy, so-called? How are you actually making practical changes in the lives of office workers? You’re articulating the problems, and that’s very important. But what’s step two? How are you going to get people into the arena? How are you going to get people actually demanding things and winning things?

Jake:
[13:40] So then you take the lessons you’ve learned back to Boston, where the circle of friends who sat on the floor at lunchtime is ready to do something, to take that next step. What did you do when you got home?

Ellen Cassedy:
[13:51] The first thing we did was we decided we would call up the Chamber of Commerce of Boston and ask that they hold a forum on the concerns of office workers. Not a bad idea. And to our amazement, one of the executives actually agreed to come and meet with us. And he did, and we presented our demand that he hold this for him. And he said, well, let me think about that. And he went back to the office, and soon afterwards we got a letter from him saying, well, we’ve thought about it, and we’ve decided not to. We won’t. Sorry.

Ellen Cassedy:
[14:23] Take up these matters with your own bosses in your own individual offices. Well, that’s not what we wanted to do. We wanted to have a big, splashy event where employers would listen to the concerns of women office workers and listen to our demands and start implementing them. Well, that was a little too ambitious. So we had to step back, think about it again, make a change of plans, and we decided to hold our own forum. And we started recruiting all over town and we found people who would speak up about their problems in law offices and hospitals and, universities and publishing companies and banks and insurance companies and pretty soon we had a great lineup of women who had never spoken up publicly about what was bothering them and now they were ready to do so we held that forum we invited the press we worked really hard to get media to cover it and hundreds of people came and it was a big success and all of a sudden there we were in the newspapers on tv and people were starting to think hmm we’ve always done it this way but maybe there’s a better way.

Jake:
[15:29] Speaking of the Chamber of Commerce fella telling you to go back and address this with your individual bosses in your individual workplaces, were you going back to your office at Harvard after attending Midwest Academy?

Ellen Cassedy:
[15:42] I quit my job at Harvard and I became a full-time organizer.

Jake:
[15:46] I can’t imagine the leap of faith that that must take. From a practical standpoint, how do you put food on the table at that point?

Ellen Cassedy:
[15:53] Yeah, I had about $50 in my bank account and we were scraping by, people were collecting pennies and so on. It was scary. We didn’t have resources. But I had the example of other people in that organizer school and that was really helpful. And the Boston YWCA rented us an office for $100 a month, which to them seemed really like not much, but to us seemed like, oh, my goodness, how are we going to raise that money? But we did. You know, somehow we figured it out. Somebody got a grant from her church, and we pooled our resources, and we made it happen.

Jake:
[16:29] Within a year or two, it seems like the organization was growing enough to have paid employees. Besides just yourself, how do you build to that point?

Ellen Cassedy:
[16:38] We, first of all, worked really hard. I was in that office 10, 12 hours a day. And Karen Nussbaum, one of our co-founders, also started working part-time and she came on as a staff person. And we just found creative ways to get small government grants and private foundation grants. And eventually we started raising money from door to door and we made it work.

Jake:
[17:06] I was really interested to read the importance of lunches in building this 9 to 5 movement. I think somewhere you used the phrase, an endless series of lunches to grow the movement. Tell us a little bit about why that was such an important tool for this specific type of organizing.

Ellen Cassedy:
[17:25] Everybody was downtown. All the offices were downtown and everyone had a lunch hour. So it was a great way to meet people. And we felt really strongly that not everybody feels confident enough to speak up in a meeting. That’s comfortable for some people, but not for everyone. And a movement needs all kinds of people, the shy, the bold, everybody in between. So this was a way for us to sit down across a table one-on-one and hear from people. And we were listening really carefully. What words are people using? We were shocked to find out that people didn’t use the word boss that often. They were more likely to say management or employer. People didn’t use the word worker. They were more likely to say employee or staff. People didn’t use the word wages. All these sort of iconic words that I thought people would be using, they weren’t. And so we were listening like crazy to how people were talking and what they were concerned about. I think I figured I was pretty bored in my job at Harvard, and I thought I would hear a lot about people being bored. Well, we didn’t.

Ellen Cassedy:
[18:28] We heard about people caring really deeply about the job they were doing and how well they were doing it and feeling very resentful that they weren’t being recognized for their good work and weren’t being allowed to contribute their skills to make the place work and run better. I’m jumping ahead a little bit, but you’re going to hear about the 9 to 5 movie where a lot of the point made in that movie is that here are these three women who are very good at what they’re doing and nobody wants to hear from them and they make sure that they are heard from. So, these lunches, sometimes I ate three lunches a day. It was grueling work, I’ll tell you.

Ellen Cassedy:
[19:05] We were instructed at the Midwest Academy as to exactly what to eat at the lunch, because one day I made the mistake of bringing an artichoke to lunch with someone, and that was a big mistake. They advised coffee, a small sandwich, a piece of pie. I thought, piece of pie? I’m not getting a piece of pie. But anyway, something that’s really easy to handle while you’re listening to all this information that’s coming in, fascinating information about different kinds of people. And, you know, no, people were not willing to, march into their boss’s office and make a demand. And the idea of bringing a few of your friends with you, collective action, that was far from people’s minds. The idea of sitting down across the table to negotiate with management over how much you were paid and how you were treated, that was almost inconceivable to most people. And let me say, employers were intent on keeping it that way. So we had to think of all kinds of creative ways to get people’s concerns out in the public eye and into the eye of their boss, their employer, without them having to take too much of a risk. And we did that.

The Women’s Rights Bill

Jake:
[20:13] So, one example of that, it sounds like, is a series of surveys that you used to build up sort of a base of data information about the workplace and then present that to the public at a, hearing on the working conditions of women office workers in April of 74. Can you describe what that event was like? And then I believe that’s the event where the Bill of Rights for Women Office Workers was put forward. So tell us about the event itself and then the outcome from that.

Ellen Cassedy:
[20:44] Well, there were hundreds of women gathered at the YWCA, and up on the dais, we had representatives from people who worked in law firms, people who worked in insurance companies, banks, publishing companies, small businesses. And one by one, they got up and told their story. And some people were so scared that they were afraid they might throw up. And so our answer to that was, just bring a small wastebasket with you, just in case. Well, nobody did throw up, and the applause was deafening when people told their stories, and it just meant so much to people to hear, oh, yes, I feel that way, too. And then we presented our Bill of Rights for Women Office Workers, which we had carefully created and developed, in a meeting of people calling out, I want health care, and I want child care, and I want equal pay, and I want.

Ellen Cassedy:
[21:41] Pay of comparable worth, and I want promotion opportunities. I want a job description. We had all that written down on a beautiful piece of paper that looked like the Declaration of Independence. And then it was published in all the newspapers, and it was on TV. And people took those things back to their office, and they thought about what was going on in their office and what could be done. But again, the answer was, for most people, was not to go marching into the boss’s office with a group of their friends. Instead, we had to create these things like getting government agencies to call these banks on their discriminatory practices and threaten them. If you don’t make changes, you’re not going to get your government contract anymore. You’re not going to get your license to be an insurance company anymore. And even though, in fact, the government rarely came through and actually made good on those threats, just the bad publicity was worth a huge amount, and especially for businesses in the service sector. Reputation is everything. So a bank that was getting in the papers for not treating its workers right, they didn’t want that. And so they started to make changes. Even banks that we were not targeting would start, oh, maybe we should give a raise. Maybe we should post jobs.

Jake:
[23:02] Let’s try to stay off of their list before we get our names in the papers, right?

Ellen Cassedy:
[23:05] Exactly.

Publishing Fight Goes Mainstream

Jake:
[23:07] The organization 9to5 grew quickly enough that within just a few years, it sounds like different members or different organizers would specialize in different fields of business with insurance and finance and academic work. And then you went into the publishing industry as sort of your specialty. Tell us a little bit about how your organizing with the Women in Publishing group went forward. And then it seems like you struggled to strike the right tone at first to work with a group of women who might not have always been comfortable using the dreaded F word for feminist.

Ellen Cassedy:
[23:42] Right. Well, that’s really an interesting point. Feminist. Dolly Parton was asked, are you a feminist? And she said, no, I’m a woman in business. And then about a year later, she said, well, you know, I believe a woman should be able to do whatever she wants to do. Maybe I am a feminist. That happened to us over and over again. And we didn’t use that word because many times when I went to those lunches, before a woman even sat down, she would say, you know, I just want you to know I am not a feminist. And then you’d get talking and she was for equal pay. She was being treated for being treated just like anybody else. She was for equality in the workplace.

Ellen Cassedy:
[24:22] And so sometimes people who got involved in our organization would come around to saying, you know what, I think I am a feminist. But we didn’t let vocabulary get in the way of solidarity. It wasn’t important to us. You can use that word or not use that word. And I think one of our great achievements was creating a safe space for people who did use that word and people who did not use that word. So in publishing, yeah, a lot of people wouldn’t use the word feminist, but these women were angry.

Ellen Cassedy:
[24:52] They did a survey and they found out that it was worth, on average, $3,500 extra to be a man in publishing. And women were blocked from the higher positions. They had a rule that you could not ascend to the job of editor unless you’d already been a salesperson. And there weren’t any saleswomen. There were only salesmen. And when women tried out for those jobs, they were told, well, you know, the customers won’t like a woman in that job. That happened not only in publishing, but in banking insurance all over the place. So I was pretty frustrated at first as an organizer because I kept coming up with these ideas of, oh, let’s pick at this place. Let’s, you know, take a very.

Ellen Cassedy:
[25:33] Harsh tone. And women really pushed back against that. And I had to learn to keep my mouth shut. And I did. And bit by bit, they became so militant. They did their survey. They found ways to sue three large publishers in conjunction with the Attorney General of Massachusetts. And we won more than a million dollars in back pay and raises. And they eventually did find themselves sitting across the table from management and making demands. And the publishing industry really, really changed to the point where it was no longer worth $3,500 extra to be a man. Women were finding their way into positions all up and down the career ladder. And it was a wonderful experience. And I really grew as an organizer because, I learned to really listen and really respect where working women were at.

Jake:
[26:30] So you were hearing stories from women all over Boston by this time, beyond just the publishing industry. You were hearing from universities, MIT, tech companies, other office workers. And some of the women you were hearing from or meeting with had attempted to either form unions or join existing unions, what were they running up against? What was the experience of trying to unionize as an office worker like for these women?

Ellen Cassedy:
[26:58] When we got started, we went around and talked to union officials in various unions around Boston, and it was like ships passing in the night. They couldn’t really grasp what we were talking about. We said, here’s this whole unorganized workforce just sitting there, and you don’t have any connection to them. They don’t feel connected to you. You don’t feel connected to them. How about doing some organizing? And what we heard was very dismissive from most people. Women can’t be organized. Not worth it. Unless they come to us, we’re not going to them. The funniest response we got was from a union official who said, organizing women office workers, that’s actually a good idea. And if I could get a girl in here to do my typing, I’d be out there in the field with you.

Ellen Cassedy:
[27:45] Well, that wasn’t what we were looking for. So we kept at it. We felt sure that unions should be in women office workers’ future. There was no reason for them not to be. And union workers to this day make much more money and have a say over their working conditions. And this is sort of what we were. We were kind of a non-union force making union-style demands.

Ellen Cassedy:
[28:12] And to make that stable and steady and serious, we were going to need a union. So we, as the years went by, we kept talking to unions and we eventually got a contract from the Service Employees International Union, one of the really big unions, to have our own union local and it eventually became a union district all over the country. We hired our own organizers. It was a woman-run outfit. And we sort of brought the spirit of the 9 to 5 working women’s organizing into our union organizing. And that meant we had meetings at lunchtime instead of in the evenings. We used that same very personal one-on-one organizing that we’ve been using with all our lunches in our union organizing as well. So our organizers went and talked to everybody not once but twice, three times during the union drive. And we made demands about equal pay and childcare and job sharing and flex time, things that working women really needed and wanted. And that union is still in existence today. And the city of Seattle, University of Washington and childcare workers and home care workers are still organizing under the aegis of District 925, as it was called.

Jake:
[29:36] Look at that number.

Union Tactics and Setbacks

Jake:
[29:38] Right. You mentioned earlier in our conversation how hard bosses worked to prevent the sort of conversations that would lead to a union from breaking out in the workplace. How were offices structured to prevent people from getting to know each other well enough to be able to unionize? And how do you overcome that?

Ellen Cassedy:
[29:57] Employers had two strategies, the positive and the negative. So the negative was when we passed out our newsletters outside the big revolving doors of the skyscrapers, there would be supervisors waiting right inside those doors, waiting to snatch those newsletters out of women’s hands. The open office was such that you could not get up from your typewriter and go across the room to talk to someone else without your supervisor’s head popping up and the supervisor noticing and taking notes, look who’s talking to whom. We had to get around that. And we found all kinds of ways to get around that. The positive way was giving in. Companies realized, you know, we could afford to spend a little more on office workers’ pay. We could afford to post jobs on the bulletin board instead of just giving those jobs to someone’s nephew. We could afford to use all this woman power that’s sitting out there unused and promote some women. And big changes were made.

Jake:
[30:58] Some of the big changes took a long time. I noted in the book that you mentioned that the clerical workers at Harvard did get a union, but not until 1989. Was that a bittersweet moment for you having started out there?

Ellen Cassedy:
[31:11] That was really something. Yeah. And they had this slogan, we can’t eat prestige, which meant, yes, it’s prestigious to work at Harvard and we’re proud to work here, but we also need a living wage.

Jake:
[31:26] By the maybe mid or late 70s, 9to5 was maturing as an organization, sort of professionalizing the board and having broader fundraising efforts, which gives you more of a budget, imposing self-evaluations on staff and organizers. How did that lead to a new role for you within 9to5?

Ellen Cassedy:
[31:46] At first, it was very informal. I was on the staff. Karen Nussbaum was on the staff. And we typed and filed and leafleted and went to lunch and ran meetings and so on. But we were very dedicated to the idea that we were going to be a professional organization. And so we created a board, we incorporated, and we had maybe seven women working in this teeny little office, a little beehive of an office. It was at the Y. I became the staff director, and I learned all these, you know, how to be a humane manager. Evaluations, meetings, salary reviews, all the things that we were asking employers, real employers to do, we also implemented in our own organization.

Taking On the Bosses

Jake:
[32:37] One of the last major campaigns, it sounds like you took on here in Boston, specifically as the 70s were turning into the 80s, was with this group called the Boston Survey Group, which has a very innocuous and bland sounding name. What was this organization and what was 9to5’s relationship with them like?

Ellen Cassedy:
[32:58] It was a secret cabal of employers, and they claimed that their object was just simply to just get together and share information. Well, we found out that what they were sharing was information about what they were paying every step on the career ladder. And that turns out to be illegal. You’re not allowed to set wages, you know, collude to set wages, to set prices. That’s called monopoly. There’s another word, monopsony, which means setting wages, colluding to keep wages down. Well, we got the Attorney General of Massachusetts to look into this and to sue them. And it meant suing all the big companies in the Boston area, the biggest banks, biggest insurance companies.

Jake:
[33:45] My understanding from the book is that that lawsuit’s arranged actually under antitrust law.

Ellen Cassedy:
[33:50] Right, the SEC. Eventually, they settled. And that was what happened to us over and over again. Rather than things going to trial, the companies would think, wait a minute, wait a minute, our reputation is suffering. Let’s just put an end to this. And they settled and they stopped sharing the information in the same way. So that was a victory. But I have to say that I think the real import of that whole issue was just publicizing that that was happening rather than the eventual end to it, if it really did end. But just having people begin to think, wait a minute, you know, and have their self-respect go up and their belief in the power of collective action to go up through something like that was the most important thing about it.

Convention and Movie Buzz

Jake:
[34:38] At the end of 1979, you were going to head off to a new chapter of your life. You were going to be living in Philadelphia, continuing to organize in the Washington, D.C. area. But to keep us focused on our Boston History podcast on Boston, in the last year before you left, 9 to 5 would host this Working Women’s Convention. And I was hoping you could describe the focus of that event and how you ended up with Senator Ted Kennedy as the keynote speaker for that evening.

Ellen Cassedy:
[35:06] We were a five-year-old organization, which to us seemed like an eternity, but it’s really young. And just imagine the thrill of walking into this huge hotel with a red carpet with gold in it and these beautiful gold-plated chairs and the dais and the chandeliers. And a thousand women came. It was so exciting. And our senator, Ted Kennedy, was the keynote speaker. And again, we made our demands. We had people speak from the heart. And at the end of the event, our chair, the woman who was chairing the meeting, made the announcement that Jane Fonda was going to be making a movie about the concerns of office workers. And the place just went crazy. So it was just a thrilling capstone of everything we’ve been doing for five years.

Jake:
[36:02] I know you weren’t in Boston anymore by the time the movie was made, or at least by the time it was released, but I think you were still here when Jane Fonda came to town to host a brown bag lunch for the economic rights of working women, in 79. Were you still here for that?

Ellen Cassedy:
[36:18] Yes, I was. And this was one event that we did not have to work very hard to get people to come.

Jake:
[36:24] I bet.

Ellen Cassedy:
[36:25] It was a lunchtime event at a movie theater and women just streamed in and Jane Fonda addressed the group. She said, I was a secretary myself. I got fired. And she told about how she was making this movie that was going to show what happened when you took the boss out of the office and turn it over to the office worker. And that’s what happened and people were so thrilled just having somebody with that kind of star power whether it was Ted Kennedy or Jane Fonda to endorse and validate what we were talking about it meant a lot.

The Movie Boost

Jake:
[37:03] How did 9to5 as an organization capitalize on the success of the 9to5 movie, not just in Boston, but just as the organization overall?

Ellen Cassedy:
[37:14] That movie gave our organization a tremendous boost. It was called 9to5 after our organization. We’re the organization that inspired the movie. We inspired Dolly Parton’s song. And today, to this very day, people recognize that phrase, nine to five, as meaning the hours of the working day and sort of respect for the people who do that kind of work. So we were instantly recognizable everywhere. When we showed up and said, we’re nine to five, oh, nine to five. I know that concept. I know that movie. I was on the bus one day shortly after the movie was released, and I heard these two women talk to each other. and one of the women was saying, so I said to him, no, I will not make your coffee. I just saw nine to five. And that was happening all over. When the movie was in production, one of the producers told a newspaper that after this movie comes out, making coffee will never be the same. And he was right. Countless bosses learn how to make their own coffee.

Jake:
[38:19] I have known the song since I can remember, but I had never watched the movie until after Dolly passed. And it was really funny. I mean, it’s of its era, but it has the sort of same late 70s, early 80s brand of humor as like a Blues Brothers, I think. Cracked me up time and time again, but I couldn’t help but notice that when left alone, the three women at the heart of the movie put into effect in their workplace a lot of the things that might have been in your Bill of Rights for Working Women.

Ellen Cassedy:
[38:52] That’s right. And once you took the boss out of the equation, the women really knew how to make that company run better than it ever had before.

What 9 to 5 Changed

Jake:
[39:02] Now, I think it’s fair to say that more of your career as an organizer took place outside of Boston than in. But if you look back at this distance to the 70s and your time with 9 to 5 here in Boston, what are you most proud of?

Ellen Cassedy:
[39:20] We brought the concerns of office workers into the public eye. And we said, here’s a group of workers you’ve probably never thought about, but we matter. We deserve rights and respect. and that meant so did everybody else in the workforce. It was a thrilling, thrilling time for me when we made big changes in the lives of office workers all over the city. And I think there’s more to be done, of course. There are still low-wage jobs and dead-end jobs and women and people of color are most likely to be stuck in those jobs. But today a greater percentage of people support unions than have in two generations the support for unions is huge much higher than people support for, congress say and i think that’s a really good sign and i think america’s working people will not stop coming up with creative new strategies to improve our situation so i have hope for the future.

Jake:
[40:25] I try to as well. It’s harder these days than it has been at some points. Before I wrap this up, is there anything that you wish I had asked you today that I didn’t ask about?

Ellen Cassedy:
[40:37] Working 9 to 5 is a memoir of my time as a working woman in the office and also as an organizer of working women. And it’s also a memoir of a whole movement. It talks about the experiences of what it’s like to get involved in trying to change your situation. How do you get together with other people? It’s packed with information about how to win. And writing that book was a wonderful trip into the past for me. But it’s also, it’s about the future as well, because every generation has got to win it again. There’s no end. You never really achieve everything you’re going for. We want a lot. We want sexual harassment becoming illegal, pregnancy discrimination becoming illegal. Women with college educations are now, the managerial jobs are open to us. And there are other changes that have been made, like things that used to be considered personal matters are now matters of policy, corporate policy, union policy, government policy. But as I said, there’s a long way to go. And I think my book can help people get there.

Jake:
[41:49] Well, Ellen, if people want to find out more about you, more about the book Working 9 to 5, where should they look for that?

Ellen Cassedy:
[41:57] My website, ellenCassedy.com. And my book is available at bookstores and online sellers everywhere.

Jake:
[42:06] 9 to 5 is still an active movement, an active organization, if people want to learn more about the work that they’re still doing for working women, where can they look for that?

Ellen Cassedy:
[42:16] 9to5.org.

Jake:
[42:18] Ellen Cassedy, I just want to say thanks so much for joining us today.

Ellen Cassedy:
[42:22] Thank you, Jake. It’s really been a pleasure.

Jake:
[42:26] To learn more about Ellen Cassedy and the 9to5 movement, check out this week’s show notes at hubhistory.com slash 362. We’ll have links to Ellen’s website and to the website of the 9to5 movement, which is still organizing local coalitions and fighting for the rights of all workers. I’ll also include an affiliate link where your purchase of the book Working 9to5 supports this podcast, Ellen, and independent bookstores. Along with those, I’ll include links to some other historical materials, like the archive of SEIU Local 925 and oral histories with Ellen and other movement founders. You should really also watch Dolly Parton and the Movie 9 to 5, which is currently streaming on Hulu, Netflix, and Disney+.

Jake:
[43:18] If you’d like to get in touch with us, you can email podcast at hubhistory.com. I have profiles for Hub History on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and over on Mastodon, where you can find me as at hubhistoryatbetter.boston. As I keep saying in these outros, I’m not super into social media right now. I’ve taken a little bit of a step back, but I am still active on Blue Sky. If you want to see me actively posting or interacting with listeners, Blue Sky is the best place for that. Find me on Blue Sky by searching for hubhistory.com. If you’ve also taken a bit of a step back from social media, just go to hubhistory.com and click on the Contact Us link. While you’re on the site, hit the subscribe link, and be sure that you never miss an episode. If you subscribe on Apple Podcasts, please consider writing us a brief review. If you do, drop me a line. I’d love to send you a Hub History sticker as a token of appreciation. That’s all for now. Stay safe out there, listeners.