The 9to5 Project

FAIN: TD-50672-14

Community Media Productions (Yellow Springs, OH 45387-1625)
Julia Reichert (Project Director: August 2013 to July 2016)

Development of a 60-minute documentary on the movement to organize women office workers during the 1970s and 1980s.

Most of us have heard the song "Nine to Five," sung with an edge by Dolly Parton. Then there's the star studded film "9 to 5," the second highest grossing movie of 1980. Yet few realize that these two icons of popular culture actually grew out of a social movement that spanned over twenty-five years, which sought to have a profound impact on work for women, and on the labor movement itself. The film we are making, for which we seek development funds, will rediscover this story, and the unlikely leaders who emerged from the steno pool. In the early 1970s, a group of women office workers in Boston decided that they had suffered in silence long enough. They were tired of low wages, sexual harassment, lack of opportunity to advance. They were fed up with the disrespect and the many small, daily humiliations. They created a nationwide organization to force changes in their workplaces, and called it 9 to 5.