by Nikil Saval
In this firm the men wear the suits and ties and sit in the offices, and the women get their coffee, get their sandwiches, fix their bouillon. A lot of women say they don’t mind doing it, but at the same time they hate doing it. It’s tradition. They’re afraid to go in and say, “I’m sorry, I don’t want to do it anymore.” Men will even get up, walk to the women standing at the coffee wagon, dump a dime in their hand, and say, “Can I have a regular?” I mean they’re right there! We’re told to “Xerox this for me” or “would you get me a pack of cigarettes downstairs.” 61
From a BusinessWeek ad from 1967: the sort of images that fueled office feminism.
So it was the simple assumption on the part of the bosses that women would not only be expected to do their actual work, which was dreary enough, but also cheerfully perform “home” tasks in the office that made the coffee duty, and things like it, so irksome. It was the insult that pointed most clearly to the deeper injury.
Finally, an organization took hold. In 1970, a group of secretaries working for a downtown accounting firm in Boston, sick of the way their work was apportioned and organized, had banded together to come up with a solution. They circulated a memo redrawing the lines of hierarchy and expanding the responsibilities—hitherto menial—of the office secretaries. One of the secretaries responsible for the memo was fired. A few years later, she became one of the founding members of the organization 9to5, a Boston-wide organization of women clerical workers.62 One of the many “locals” springing up in cities all over the country, 9to5, headed by the charismatic Karen Nussbaum, a New Left antiwar activist who had been a clerk and typist at Harvard, quickly became the most famous. Media savvy, 9to5 invited the press to all of its events, ensuring that even the smallest actions would get coverage. It began circulating a newsletter, 9to5 News, which quickly garnered six thousand subscribers.63 And it began to initiate an impressive number of direct-action activities to further its goals of achieving rights for women office workers.
One of the typical moves of the 9to5-ers was to subvert office hierarchies as they were expressed in layout and design. After all, no one knows better how an office can express status and privilege than a secretary chained to a metal desk in a noisy typing pool. In one action, a university group managed to secure a meeting with the vice president of personnel (after eight months of attempts). The members of the group arrived before he did. Naturally, the desk was set up executive-style, back against the far wall, with enormous windows on either side, so that the sun beamed into the eyes of anyone sitting in the chair across from the vice president. It was meant, of course, to convey the vice president’s immense authority. The leader of the group said, “I don’t like to have the sun shining in my eyes, do you?” The group accordingly lined up behind the desk, so when the vice president walked in, he was unnervingly confronted with a line of women occupying the position he would normally take. He took the only seat available to him—an ordinary chair. In a similar example in Chicago in 1975, a group of legal secretaries protested against a new plan to square more secretaries into less space in cubicles. They circulated a petition, which actually forced the attorneys to come up with a redesign. “I really believe this is the first time the Administrative Committee actually sat down and discussed secretaries as people,” one of the secretaries said. “And the fact that they actually called the architects and told them to go back to the drawing boards is a very important thing.”64
The secretarial revolt hit the mainstream in 1980, when the Jane Fonda–produced feminist classic 9 to 5 appeared in movie theaters. A satire-farce about sex discrimination in the office, it concerned three clerical workers (Lily Tomlin, Dolly Parton, and Fonda) who suffered from the undeserved abuse, or unwanted attentions, offered up by a man they call only “the boss” (Dabney Coleman). One evening, debilitatingly high after sharing a joint, they each conjure up stoned fantasies of treating their boss to his comeuppance, including hog-tying him, shooting him with a hunting rifle, and—of course—pouring rat poison in his coffee. A series of more or less implausible plot twists result in their sequestering him in his own home in an impressively S&M-like bondage getup, while they take over the workplace and institute then-novel reforms: flexible hours, job sharing, day care at work. In a blatant argument for how design is tied up with work, they even reshape the office. By the end of the film, it has changed from a gray open-bull-pen typing pool, with the usual rows of serried desks, to a swirling mélange of variegated partitions, flourishing plants, and desks arranged into unorthodox angles. The vision 9 to 5 offered of the liberated workplace was in fact a Bürolandschaft, an office landscape.
The amazing thing is that all of these details—save tying up the boss—were taken from workers’ own experiences. Fonda had gone to Nussbaum to ask her about what office workers thought of their jobs. She visited the Cleveland chapter of Nussbaum’s organization, Women Working, and she and a scriptwriter spent a night speaking with forty office workers, from which emerged the story that they told. Nussbaum joined Fonda on a speaking tour promoting the movie. “It was the best example I’ve ever seen of popular culture helping to lift organization and movement,” Nussbaum would later say. “You had to fight hard on this issue about whether there was discrimination or not,” continued Nussbaum, “and then Jane Fonda makes a movie that mocks discrimination in the workplace and the argument is over, because women have been poised on the edge of their chairs, ready to understand it this way and then this capped it and made it, the behavior of the bosses and the discrimination, the object of ridicule.”65
Yet, in hindsight, 9 to 5 also might have made a casualty of the movement that it sought to promote. As a film, it makes sex discrimination the central issue of the workplace and suggests that by ending it, the workplace can become a utopia. The chief message that seemed to emerge from the movie was that flextime and an end to harassment were all that stopped women from being free as workers. But 9to5 and organizations like it were about something bigger. They seemed to promise that organizing women office workers would in fact result in more humane workplaces altogether. Sex and class went hand in hand, since sex discrimination had created a gendered “working class” within the office. Collections of interviews with office workers in the movement suggested that racism was also a problem that they wanted to address, and of course they were concerned that office work itself, regardless of the gender of the person doing it, was a nightmare. In a survey of women office workers conducted in 1981, respondents indicated that “lack of promotions or raises” was the chief complaint (52 percent). This was followed by “low pay,” “monotonous, repetitive work,” “no input into decision-making,” and “heavy workload/overtime.”66
Thanks to sex discrimination, women were indeed disproportionately slotted into jobs that were degrading and soulless. But the jobs themselves would not disappear if women were taken out of those positions. Working Girl, in many respects a more conservative film than 9 to 5, acknowledged this. Though Melanie Griffith’s Tess suffers sex discrimination early in the film, she suffers even more because of her class—indicated above all by her viscously thick Staten Island accent—which slots her into a secretarial role that no one takes seriously. It’s thanks to the secretarial revolt—or to feminism more generally—that women are able to be bosses at all, but sisterhood didn’t (yet) have enough to say about the divide between the middle and the working classes. Pointing the moral even further, the film indicates that it’s Tess’s working-woman smarts that end up providing her with her business knowledge: unlike the middle-class Katharine, Tess reads the tabloid newspapers, which tell her more about the scandalous private lives of businesspeople—which in turn gives her special insight into where a CEO or investor might take his or her company next. At the end of the film, Tess ends up with a secretary of her own, whom, the film implies, she promises to treat better than Sigourney Weaver treated her, thanks to her own working-class experience.
This is of course a fantasy as strong as anything offe
red by 9 to 5. And interviews with office workers in the 1970s suggested that at least a few women clerical workers were not inclined to believe it. “Even girls who have been pretty good kids as clerks—once they become supervisors, they change,” one worker was quoted as saying. Her co-worker concurred: “I think they get into positions that they have someone to answer to, and I think they forget to be human beings; they become part of the establishment. Perhaps they’re told, ‘The workers are the workers and you are the boss, and you keep the workers in their place and you stay in your place.’ And I think that after a while they feel as though they are the king. They begin to believe it.”67
An interviewer asked the workers what they would do if they could change their office in any way they wanted. “Get rid of management!” one responded. “We’ll run the business for a while!” the other said. “I think when you sit there as a clerk,” the first worker went on, “you see a lot of things that they do backwards. You would maybe use a more logical approach. I think I’d like to see more flexibility. And I think I’d do away with job levels and just make everybody more equal.”68
8
THE OFFICE OF THE FUTURE
From some distant cubicle comes a tinny electronic melody Maxine recognizes as “Korobushka,” the anthem of nineties workplace fecklessness, playing faster and faster and accompanied by screams of anxiety … Has she entered some supernatural timewarp where the shades of office layabouts continue to waste uncountable person-hours playing Tetris? Between that and Solitaire for Windows, no wonder the tech sector tanked.
—THOMAS PYNCHON, Bleeding Edge1
Office worker discontent didn’t only inspire organizing; unionization, as well as groups like 9to5, remained rare. But there was another branch of discontent: one that led straight into reshaping the physical world of the office. As with the countercultural ideas that made their way into management textbooks of the 1960s, a handful of disgruntled white collars translated their unhappiness into design. Looking back at the 1970s unexpectedly discloses a fertile moment for the future of the office. Many of the things said then could be said now—or, perhaps, were realized in the future that is our present.
Seeing that they were on the cusp of some hitherto invisible computer revolution, a number of researchers began predicting vast changes in the nature of office work. These were accompanied by a significant number of writers who, unlike the researchers, had done virtually no research. Though they had little intellectual capital to offer, they became well-remunerated professional futurologists, whose job was to get people excited about the brave new world of work that was coming into being. Thanks to the cunning of history, many of their predictions would in fact come to pass.
In 1975, BusinessWeek coined a phrase with its series of articles on “the office of the future.” Reporting on the as-yet-unseen future of the computerized office, experts predicted the end of everything that the office was known for: the end of typewriters; the end of secretaries; and the end, above all, of paper. George E. Pake, head of Xerox’s research division, accurately predicted the emergence of an electronic form of correspondence. He described a “TV-display terminal with keyboard.” “I’ll be able to call up documents from my files on the screen, or by pressing a button,” he said. “I can get my mail or any messages. I don’t know how much hard copy [that is, printed paper] I’ll want in this world.”2 Though confidently imagining a paperless office, experts were quick to say that changes were not around the corner. “It will be a long time—it always takes longer than we expect to change the way people customarily do their business,” said the president of Redactron Corporation, a manufacturer of text-editing typewriters (that is, typewriters that could also correct documents).3 And yet just a few years later, the National Science Foundation (NSF) encouraged a group of its workers to try out having all their work “on-line.” Excluding any kind of paper use except what was necessary to communicate with people outside their group, a manager, four professionals, and a secretary stored all of their work using digital means. Amazingly, despite the rudimentary quality of computer storage at the time, the NSF recorded productivity gains.4 The world of The Jetsons might not be that far off after all.
Only a few years earlier, and little noticed, a group of product engineers at IBM had tried something that was, in their words, “radically new.” They moved into a new office space that was not only without walls but without permanent workstations. Calling it a “non-territorial office,” they tried to set up a space that would accommodate motion between different kinds of work setups, based on the particular task at hand. In addition to common tables and work benches, scattered throughout the work area, engineers had access to quiet areas where they could escape for concentrated work if necessary. The goal overall was to “improve and increase the sharing of problems and experience” within the group. Freeing people from their workstations would naturally result in greater interaction between other isolated people, the story went. The workers approached the project with trepidation; they said, in the words of the researchers who reported on the experiment, that “the opportunity to decorate a personal space has become one of the few remaining avenues for expression of individuality in large organizations.”5 But afterward, they couldn’t have been more enthusiastic. “Don’t fence me in again,” one engineer said. “I was skeptical before, but I’d hate to go back to closed office now,” said another. Data suggested that internal communication had indeed improved. The non-territorial office was, in this instance, a success.6
Visions of paperless and non-territorial offices were contemporary with another kind of visionary idea: that there wouldn’t really need to be offices at all. Alvin Toffler predicted in the early 1980s that telecommunications technologies would revolutionize the workplace. People would no longer work in offices; instead, they would be housed in “electronic cottages” in the countryside, linked to a worldwide network that made office buildings obsolescent. In a suitably apocalyptic (but not too exaggerated) image, he imagined downtowns “stand[ing] empty, reduced to use as ghostly warehouses or converted into living space.”7 Though “working from home” was a concept decidedly in its infancy, Toffler’s idea had precedents. Stuck in a traffic jam on his way to his L.A. office one day in the 1970s, the American researcher Jack Nilles (who was, quite literally, a rocket scientist) began to imagine ways that people might be able to avoid costly and frustrating commutes altogether. Long commutes were polluting, encouraged wasteful sprawl, and above all were inefficient. With a grant from the National Science Foundation, he began a feasibility study for an L.A. insurance firm of something he called “telecommuting.” Because the firm was located in an old crumbling building in a neighborhood with an aging population, it had to attract younger workers from far away, who were loath to brave the arduous travel time to work in a crummy office, no matter how attractive the company was. (And the company was attractive: it provided a higher salary than most comparable places, free hot lunches, and a reduced workweek of 37.5 hours.) Nilles enthusiastically concluded that telecommuting was a viable option. He mentioned hesitations: supervisors would no longer be able to control their employees; and workers themselves might miss out on the social atmosphere of office life. But the company went forward with it. As soon as it began to be effective, the project was canned. It turned out managers felt threatened by telecommuting: they weren’t able to control their employees in the same way as before and had to change their methods.8
Things in 1980s offices often seemed grim, but in the late 1990s a utopia seemed to emerge on the horizon. It was way out, beyond the highest ranks of the corporate world in New York or Boston or even Tokyo. In this new land, the story went, the workplaces were full of the smartest people on earth, knowledge workers in the truest sense, starting companies left and right, some of them crashing to earth, others lighting up the sky like streaking comets. In the 1990s, the office world suddenly seemed—once again—full of promise, and the whisper in everyone’s ears was the old one: Go west …
Drive on U.S. 280 down from San Francisco in the springtime, and you find yourself emerging from the thick, fogbound hills of South San Francisco and Daly City, San Bruno, and Millbrae into a sinuous, verdant landscape, poppy-ridden, glinting here and there with teal reservoirs. Take the exit onto Sand Hill Road, backed by hills filled with California oaks, and you’ll find yourself in the bucolic regions of what is often taken to be the future. Soon you crest a hill and see below you a classic oasis of sprawl, striated by highways and dotted with low-rise corporate campuses. On your right is the endless sandstone campus of Stanford University (Stanford, where it always seems to be late afternoon, like a de Chirico painting). On your left, row after row of squat brick-and-glass boxes, one partnership after another: venture capital firms, whose partners can walk across the street to meet the students they plan to make rich. Here was where the office of the future at last met the people who were determined to make it real.
At least since the 1980s, Silicon Valley was the source of no end of utopian prognostications about the workplace. Not only were its soft- and hardware innovations supposed to be lightening the burden on everyone else’s work by making it less laborious and more streamlined, but the workplaces of the Valley were also seen as idylls of enlightened capitalism. Even after muckraking journalists began sneaking into its light-manufacturing chip factories and exposing toxic working conditions there, the offices were still held up as models for the rest of the country. The Valley was the world’s truest merit system, it was said; the only aristocracy there was the aristocracy of talent. Job turnover—what business writers called “churn”—was terribly high, but not, the Valley people said, because of constant layoffs. Rather, turnover was a reflection of job mobility and the relentless pace of technological change. Companies grasped eagerly at excellence, prompting people to move constantly; it was also the case that those same companies often went under and were replaced by new ones. Some individuals were serial entrepreneurs themselves: they no sooner founded a company and loaded it up with venture capital than they moved on to their next gig. Nobody needed job protection, because they had freedom instead. And they worked constantly.