Women office workers’ movement

The women office workers movement was not by any means antiunion. However, it did feel a need to develop techniques outside of the traditional union drive that would speak to women who, though perhaps not feminists themselves, were living in the context of feminism. To this end, the women office workers movement both drew on the agency feminism had granted women and imported tactics from feminism for... 

From its inception, the women office workers movement was critical of the effects of automation and new digital technologies. While desktop computers were not part of the office landscape until the 1980s, many... 

Figure 12. Cartoons from the women office workers movement of the 1970S often commented on the bodily and psychic effects of routin-ized data-processing labor done on early computing terminals. Here, the worker s body is colonized by the machinery of the VDT. FromTepper-man, Sixty Words a Minute. 

Figure 14. Management s disbelief in office hazards was a frequent theme in cartoons from the women office workers movement in the 1970s. In this cartoon from the San Francisco-area group Union wage, workers literally hit management over the head with the reality of health hazards. From Union Wage Newsletter, April/May 1975.

There is still no single disease associated with office work. Instead of finding a shared affliction such as black lung or silicosis, the women office workers movement materialized a nonspecific phenomenon that clashed with juridical, medical, and compensatory institutional demands for proof of linear causality. The women office workers movement was only able to capture the symptomatic expression of workplace conditions by simultaneously leaving the question of their causal root uncertain. Despite this dilemma, the women office workers movement was effictive in rendering perceptible a new kind of occupational health event that workers could, and would, organize around later—sick building syndrome. 

The film was used as a vehicle to promote the women office workers movement. Jane Fonda went on a national promotional tour with it. The movie s success went on to spawn a hit single, Dolly Parton s Working 9 to 5, and a short-lived television series in 1982. 

The women s liberation movement appears to be on the threshold of a second phase—when feminist consciousness reaches beyond white, middle-class women. .. [A] clear sign of the new awareness felt by the so-called typical woman is the way office workers are asserting themselves. There is nothing quite so typical as a woman who is a secretary, typist, clerk, or keypunch operator—Margie Albert, union organizer, "Something New" (1973)... 

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