It Takes So Much to Build and So Little to Destroy, but We Still Must
It takes so much vision, work, planning, collaboration and disappointment to make progress in as big and messy country as the United States, with so many varied interests and such entrenched systems for maintaining the status quo of power. There were lots of hard and frustrating “back to the drawing board” moments, many meetings with elected officials and meticulous, maddening amounts of advocacy, paperwork and finally a literal day in court to get from workspaces without accessibility for handicapped people to guaranteed access, for example, and you’d best believe your work must be absolutely unassailable and the politician friendliest to shepherding your cause gets reelected or it’s all down the drain. People who have not rolled up their sleeves and work on structural change do not understand.
A month or so ago, my husband and I watched a documentary called 9to5: The Story of a Movement, which was not about the film of the 1970s (though Jane Fonda makes an appearance) but about the cultural changes that informed the movie: Working women who had recently entered the workforce in droves and organized to end unfair and discriminatory practices in offices, gain the career advancement opportunities they deserved and be treated with respect. In 1973, working together, they established 9to5, National Association of Working Women.
These women had to challenge their own deep racial bigotries and class cluelessness to build a collaborative, creative movement together that was the antithesis of exclusionary, top-down, boy’s club, corporate culture. They had meetings over their lunch hours and in these lunchtime conversations, they learned so much more about one another and how many indignities and injustices they shared.
They compiled lists to understand what they needed, like having actual job descriptions so when the boss called out to you from his office to get him a cup of coffee as you were trying to get your actual work done, you could tell him, point blank, that is not what I am hired or paid to do and he would eventually stop doing that. They presented their needs for childcare and paid maternal leave. They didn’t get everything they wanted, but considering that when they started organizing, the terms “office wife” and “office maid” were common parlance within the work place, these women and their allies did SO much.
One of the organization’s earliest victories included a class-action suit filed against several Boston publishing companies that awarded the female plaintiffs $1.5 million in back pay and in 1975, the founders of 9to5 joined with the Service Employees International Union and formed Local 925 of the SEIU in Boston in order to help office workers gain access to collective bargaining rights.
It’s a good film and I recommend it but it’s very bittersweet. My eyes got teary with appreciation for what these brave women and everyone who had ever fought for a better, more fair and inclusive world, and the tears fell and my heart sank when I thought about where we are now, decades after these people worked so hard for the semblance of something closer to equality. The film really underscored how easy it is for boys with their wrecking balls to smash hard-fought gains to bits without a second thought. How eagerly those who have never worked for a more just society can cheer on that wreckage of so many hours of hard work, collaboration, consideration, research, advocacy and sheer sweat equity by that son of a emerald mine owner, that son of a slumlord and their enablers.
The amount that progress is going to be set back from just minutes of their attacks on it is incalculable. It will take decades, maybe generations, to recover from their wrecking balls and chainsaws, if ever.
DEI, that favorite punching bag to those in power, has its roots in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which barred employment discrimination based on race, color, sex, religion and other criteria and in the ensuing decades, a range of policies have sought to end bias in hiring, promote fairness in the workplace and open career pathways for people of color and for women, while also expanding to include sexual orientation and gender identity.
Diversity, meaning a variety of different individuals in a given workplace, across demographics like race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, disability, socioeconomic status, religion and more. Equity, meaning that everyone, regardless of their background or identity, is treated fairly and has equal access to opportunities and resources. Inclusion, meaning a workplace where all individuals feel valued, respected and empowered to fully participate and contribute. These are bad things? These are unfair things? These are things to remove?
You all, I’ve been struggling. I know many of you have as well. Things that I thought were generally settled matters have been smashed into debris. I knew it was bad but I didn’t realize how few safeguards there were for protection against aggrieved tyrants. We will get through this and we will build again but in the interim, how many people will not get anything like the “deeply imperfect but still progress” benefits so many sacrificed hours and hours of their lives to guarantee? Most important, it shouldn’t need to happen. We have already done this work. We have already made our case. We have already proven our worth, fundraised, litigated and implemented many of these common sense advancements. In the U.S., it’s in rubble at our feet.
The damage the relative few can inflict on the many, and their freedom to do so, will never fail to astonish me. It takes A LOT to create and very little to destroy. Above everything else that we do, we have to ensure that there are real protections against this kind of demolition in the future.
Marla Rose is cofounder of VeganStreet.com.
