Please Hold

Brian Balogh: On Mother’s Day in 1970 female African American telephone operators in New York City suddenly walked off the job and went on strike. It was the busiest phone day of the year and it made quite an impression on young feminist activist “Gay” Semel. Fresh out of college, Gay decided to apply for a job as an operator at New York Telephone. She hoped to help fellow operators unionize under the Communication Workers of America.

Brian Balogh: Switchboard operators had some of the most stressful jobs of anyone in the telephone company at the time. Their hours weren’t standardized. They sat at huge boards plugging cables into holes for hours, and while they were doing that managers stocked behind them, reprimanding them for not working fast enough or not sitting up straight enough. Managers could listen in on operators at any time and discipline them for not following their scripts. The company had a very specific idea about who was supposed to do these jobs, and when I spoke to [inaudible 00:10:33] back in 2015 she said she didn’t exactly fit that bill.

Brian Balogh: After she left the phone company Gay Semel became a union side labor lawyer. I spoke to her in 2015 on the first day of her retirement after working for the communication workers of America for almost 30 years.

Gay Semel: When I applied for the job I did not tell them I’d gone to college. If I had done that I never would have gotten the job, and I was one of, in my building in terms of cord board operators there was only three white women. Everyone else was black and-

Brian Balogh: And how many is everyone else?

Gay Semel: Hundreds.

Brian Balogh: Hundreds.

Gay Semel: Hundreds.

Brian Balogh: And this is a colossal board. Three white women, hundreds of African American women. No men? No men at all?

Gay Semel: No men.

Brian Balogh: Why did just women do this job?

Gay Semel: That is a very important question. At that time every single job was designated by gender and race, so all telephone operators were women. All technicians were male. Black men got hired to work on the frame. White men got hired to work as installers and switch people.

Brian Balogh: Well, what about the actual working conditions having to do with gender and sexual discrimination? What kinds of barriers did women face when they went into work each day?

Gay Semel: All right, so when you were interviewed for the job they literally asked the women, certainly the operators, what your menstrual cycle was. I was sort of shocked by that. And I said, “Why would you want to know that?” And they said, “Well, you know, this phone service as an essential service and we have to have a reliable workforce, and so we want to make sure that if people are out because they have menstrual cramps it’s in their cycle.” That was so shocking to me that they would keep a record of what your menstrual cycle was so that you couldn’t, you know, pretend that you had menstrual cramps on a different day.

Brian Balogh: Given that, Gay, one wonders why they hired women at all.

Gay Semel: Probably because women were paid a lot less than the men.

Brian Balogh: I think that might be the reason.

Gay Semel: And they couldn’t get men to work for that kind of pay. The other thing that they did when they hired you, if you had children you had to tell them who would take care of your children if they got sick, in other words that you wouldn’t stay home to take your kids if you got sick. Then you had to have a backup, who would take care of your children if they were sick and the caregiver was sick.

Brian Balogh: That’s incredible. So that was part of simply the routine interview is providing all that information.

Gay Semel: Exactly. Exactly. They treated the women like they were children. There were these ridiculous posters everywhere about being on time with little cartoon characters. You went to operator a school before you became an operator.

Brian Balogh: Operator school, tell me about that.

Gay Semel: You went to operate a school for two weeks, because you had to learn … you know, I had to learn how to use the cord board and you had to learn the little scripts of what you would say. When you finished operator school you got a pink certificate and then you got a little charm bracelet with a telephone directory on the charm. It was ridiculous.

Brian Balogh: Something tells me you are not charmed.

Gay Semel: I wasn’t charmed. No, I wasn’t charmed.

Brian Balogh: We both speculated that the company hired women precisely because they could pay them less.

Gay Semel: Absolutely.

Brian Balogh: And you were actually involved in a landmark case that challenged both pay and discrimination against women. There was a very famous settlement, $38 million. AT&T agreed to end discrimination in salaries. Did you realize any immediate benefits from that?

Gay Semel: No. I didn’t. I only stayed there two years. Right after the consent decree, which was a resolution of that lawsuit, the phone company created a whole new series of ways to make it very difficult for women in particular to get into these technician jobs, so when you applied for a job, or more likely, you applied for a transfer, you were an operator and you wanted to, you know, become a installation person or a switch person and you applied. Well, other people were applying as well, so there were these adders that gave men a boost. So the adders where previous experience, things like technical knowledge. It was very hard for women to compete because they came from operating jobs, they didn’t have prior experience, they didn’t have this technical knowledge, et Cetera. So it took a long time.