By Julianne Malveaux
(Trice Edney Wire) – Dolly Parton left us rhinestones, laughter, business savvy—and one heck of a labor anthem. Her 1980 hit “9 to 5” was catchy enough for the dance floor and pointed enough for a picket line. Workers did the labor; bosses took the credit. Women supplied the ideas; men got the promotions. Sound familiar? Forty-six years later, the daytime job remains, but the contained workday is disappearing.
The movie 9 to 5, starring Parton, Jane Fonda, and Lily Tomlin, gave us Franklin Hart, a “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.” Hart sexually harassed Doralee, lied that they were having an affair, stole Violet’s ideas, promoted a less-qualified man she had trained, and fired a worker for discussing her salary. The man misbehaved; the women paid the price. Sexual harassment, unequal pay, discriminatory promotion, wage secrecy, and workplace surveillance—9 to 5 packed a seminar on women at work into 109 funny minutes.
Franklin Hart is alive and well. He got a makeover. Perhaps he is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has removed women and Black officers from promotion lists while claiming to restore merit. Today’s Hart replaces crude insults with corporate jargon. But women still watch men take credit for their ideas and train men who are promoted over them. Black women know this workplace, even when the movie did not fully know us. Black actresses Renn Woods and Norma Donaldson played Barbara and Betty, minor workers pushed to the margins. The heroines were white, and race was missing from the film’s analysis.
Too often, white feminists said “women” when they meant white women. Black women were expected to choose between race and gender, as if either could be checked at the office door. We recognize Violet because too many of us have trained the person later promoted over us. We recognize Doralee, judged by her appearance and blamed for a powerful man’s behavior. We know the penalty for speaking plainly. A white man is forceful. A Black woman saying the same thing is angry, intimidating, or—my favorite—“not collegial.” Office and administrative-support jobs employ about one in ten American workers but 15 percent of employed Black women. We were never incidental to the American office, even when Hollywood treated us as scenery.
Black women were not centered in 9 to 5, but one became central to another Parton classic. Dolly wrote “I Will Always Love You”; Whitney Houston transformed it into a global phenomenon. Parton invested some royalties in a Black Nashville neighborhood, calling the property “the house that Whitney built.” Giving a Black woman credit did not diminish Dolly. Whitney’s brilliance made the song—and its writer—larger. Some bosses could learn from that.
Let’s not romanticize the old office. White men occupied executive suites, white women clustered around typewriters, and Black women were too often relegated to cleaning offices. We encountered both a concrete ceiling and a sticky floor. Still, the traditional job offered boundaries. You knew who employed you, what you would earn, and when you could go home. In 2017–18, 84 percent of wage-and-salary workers had regular daytime schedules. But daytime work does not guarantee predictable pay, adequate hours, benefits, or freedom from the boss after five.
The eight-hour day has been stretched, scrambled, and digitized. For some professionals, flexibility is a blessing. But flexibility for whom? Employer flexibility is often worker instability. Some workers receive schedules only days in advance. Others are called in when needed, sent home when business slows, or forced to piece together several jobs. Gig workers are called independent, but platform companies often decide which jobs they see, influence their pay, monitor their performance, and can cut off access to work. The boss has not disappeared. The boss has become software.
Let’s call this what it is: a transfer of risk from capital to labor. Employers once carried the cost when business was slow. Now workers absorb it through canceled shifts, inadequate hours, unpredictable pay, and unpaid availability. The boss gets flexibility; the worker gets anxiety. Time is part of a worker’s compensation. When an employer claims your evenings, changes your schedule without notice, or expects you to wait unpaid for work, that employer is taking something of value. The office closes, but the email keeps coming. The laptop becomes an electronic leash.
A contained workday was not a gift from generous employers. Workers organized and fought for it. The women in 9 to 5 also changed their workplace, introducing equal pay, flexible schedules, job sharing, and onsite childcare. Morale improved, and productivity rose by 20 percent. Their flexibility served workers, not merely the boss.
This Labor Day, we should ask more than how many jobs America created. Are they jobs worth having? Do they provide living wages, predictable hours, benefits, dignity, and the right to turn off the telephone? Dolly Parton made exploitation danceable. She did not make it acceptable. Workers fought for the eight-hour day, and they will have to fight again for predictable hours, decent pay, and the right to be left alone. The boss may have become software, but exploitation is still exploitation—even when there is an app for it.
Dr. Julianne Malveaux is a DC based economist and author.
