R-E-S-P-E-C-T

BRIAN: 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 Semmel.

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.

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 stalked behind them, recommending them for not working fast enough, or not sitting up straight enough. Managers could listen in on operators at any time, and discipline operators for not following their scripts. The company had a very specific idea about who was supposed to do these jobs. And Gay didn’t fit that bill.

GAY SEMMEL: 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.

BRIAN: And how many is “everyone else?”

GAY SEMMEL: Hundreds.

BRIAN: Hundreds.

GAY SEMMEL: Hundreds.

BRIAN: So this is a colossal board, three white women, the hundreds of African-American women. No men? No men at all?

GAY SEMMEL: No men. No men.

BRIAN: Why did just women do this job?

GAY SEMMEL: Ah. 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: What about the actual working conditions having to do with gender and sexual discrimination? What kinds of barriers did women face when they went in to work each day?

GAY SEMMEL: All right. So when you were interviewed for the job, they literally asked the women, certainly the operators, what your menstrual cycle was. And I was sort of shocked by that. And I said, why would you want to know that?

And they said, well, you know, the phone service is 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, as in their cycle. That was like so shocking to me, that they would keep a record of what your menstrual cycle was, so that you couldn’t pretend that you had menstrual cramps on a different day.

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

GAY SEMMEL: Probably because women were paid a lot less than the men.

BRIAN: I think that might be the reason.

GAY SEMMEL: And they couldn’t get men to have worked for that kind 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 care of kids if you got sick. And then you had to have a backup, who would take care of your children if they were sick and the caregiver was sick.

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

GAY SEMMEL: 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 school, before you became an operator.

BRIAN: Operator school, tell me about that.

GAY SEMMEL: You went to operator school for two weeks, because you had to learn all– and I had to learn how to use the cord boards. And you had to learn the little scripts of what you would say. And 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: Something tells me you were not charmed.

GAY SEMMEL: I wasn’t charmed. No, I wasn’t charmed.

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

GAY SEMMEL: Absolutely.

BRIAN: 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.

GAY SEMMEL: Right.

BRIAN: And AT&T agreed to end discrimination in salaries. Did you realize any immediate benefits from that?

GAY SEMMEL: No. I didn’t. I only stayed there two years. And right after the consent decree, which was the 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 become a installation person, or a switch person, and you applied– well, other people were applying as well. And so there were these adders that gave men a boost. So the adders were, previous experience, things like technical knowledge.

So it was very hard for women to compete, because they came from operator jobs. They didn’t have prior experience. They didn’t have this technical knowledge, et cetera. So it took a long time for all of this to change. It did not happen overnight.

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BRIAN: After she left the phone company, Gay Semmel became a union-side labor lawyer. We spoke to her on the first day of the retirement, after working for the Communication Workers of America for almost 30 years.

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