9 to 5 (1980)

and the Office That Ran Without Him

The first refusal set at work. Three women their boss kept apart, with a rumor, a spy in the ladies' room and a rule against talking about pay, compare notes and run the office better than he ever did. What it teaches about getting out without waiting for a man, and why the credit still went to him.

9 to 5 (1980). Directed by Colin Higgins, screenplay by Colin Higgins and Patricia Resnick. Jane Fonda as Judy Bernly, Lily Tomlin as Violet Newstead, Dolly Parton as Doralee Rhodes, Dabney Coleman as Franklin M. Hart Jr., with Elizabeth Wilson as Roz and Sterling Hayden as Russell Tinsworthy.

“I remember when he was just a management trainee . . . in fact, I’m the one who trained him.”

Twelve years at the company. She trained the man who took the promotion she was owed.

A note before you read. This page mentions, without detail, workplace sexual harassment and a scene in which a boss offers to trade his silence for sex. If something like this has happened to you, the Resources page has people you can reach.

This page belongs to Plot Twist. It is the fourth refusal in the series, after Labyrinth, Coming to America and Making Mr. Right, and the first one set at work. Almost every film on this page taught a woman that her way out of one man’s plan was another man. This one gets her out with two other women.

Like every entry on the Plot Twist page, it reads a story for the pattern it teaches, and makes no claim about anyone’s diagnosis. Franklin Hart is a cartoon, and the film knows it: when he demands to know why the women are doing this to him, he answers his own question. The film is a broad comedy, with poisoned coffee, a stolen corpse and a boss held prisoner in his own bedroom, and it is worth reading as one. The pattern here belongs to an office, not a romance: who gets promoted, who gets believed, and who is not allowed to talk to whom.

The Story

Judy Bernly has been a housewife until her husband left her for his secretary. Consolidated Companies is her first job. She is placed under Violet Newstead, a widow with four children, who has worked there for twelve years and knows the company better than anyone on the floor. Both of them work under the vice president, Franklin Hart, whose own secretary is Doralee Rhodes.

Hart turns Violet down for a promotion and gives it to a less-qualified man. He calls the secretaries on his floor his “girls.” He harasses Doralee constantly, and he has told the office that she is sleeping with him. She isn’t, and the whole floor has been treating her like it. His assistant, Roz, listens in the ladies’ room and reports back. When she tells him that Maria Delgado discussed her salary with a coworker, Hart has Maria fired.

That night the three women end up drinking together, then at Doralee’s house, where they trade fantasies of getting even: Judy hunting him like one of the animals on his wall, Doralee roping him like a steer, Violet poisoning his coffee in a fairy tale. The next day, distracted, Violet really does put rat poison in his coffee, from a box that looks just like the sweetener. Hart never drinks it: his chair breaks and he knocks himself out. But the women think they have killed him, steal a body from the hospital that turns out to be someone else’s, and return it.

Roz overhears them. Hart calls Doralee in and offers her a choice: spend the night with him, and he won’t report the three of them for attempted murder. She refuses. When he won’t hear her out, she ties him up.

They find out he has been selling company inventory and keeping the money, and while they wait for the invoices to prove it, they keep him at his own house. Doralee forges his signature, which she has told him she signs “better than you do,” and in his name they change the office: a daycare center, equal pay, flexible hours, job sharing that brings Maria back part-time. When the chairman of the board arrives, productivity is up twenty percent, and he congratulates Hart. He takes Hart with him to a project in Brazil.

A postscript says that Violet became vice president, Judy married the Xerox representative, and Doralee left to become a country and western singer.

9 to 5 grossed more than $100 million worldwide, and Dolly Parton’s theme song, from her first film role, was nominated for an Academy Award.

The Story Before the Story

The film was Jane Fonda’s idea, and it came from a real organization: an old friend of hers had started a group in Boston called Nine to Five, an association of women office workers. Fonda said she had heard them talk about their work, and that “they had some great stories.”

Patricia Resnick wrote the first draft as a drama. Fonda said that however they did it, it “seemed too preachy, too much of a feminist line,” and she and her producing partner decided to make it a comedy. The brief she described for the rewrite is the film’s whole argument: show “you can run an office without a boss, but you can’t run an office without the secretaries!”

That makes it one of the few films in this series built on purpose to teach a lesson, and it is worth noticing which lesson the filmmakers thought they had to disguise as a comedy to get it into theaters.

What It Gets Right

Almost everything the other films on this page got wrong.

The women don’t compete for anyone. Their friendship starts the day Doralee learns what Hart has been saying about her, and the rumor falls apart the moment the women talk to each other. The film is about what happens when the people a boss keeps apart start comparing notes.

It also takes the work seriously. The daycare, the equal pay, the flexible hours and the job sharing were real demands, and the film shows them working. The office runs better without him.

What It Teaches

1. She trained him, and he got the job

Violet has been there twelve years, and she trained Hart when he started. He gives the promotion she was owed to a man with less experience, and by the film’s account he has also taken one of her ideas as his own.

The series has met this lesson before, in Working Girl and My Fair Lady: her work, under someone else’s name. The Decoder’s card for it is Card P-2, Ownership Entitlement: “Claiming what isn’t theirs.” What 9 to 5 adds is how ordinary it looks. Nobody in the office is shocked. That is how the pattern survives: it stops looking like a pattern and starts looking like the way things are.

2. The rumor that kept her alone

Hart tells the office he is sleeping with Doralee. It isn’t true. It works anyway: the women on the floor treat her like an outsider, and she has no idea why. “So! You’ve been tellin’ everybody I’m sleepin’ with ya, huh? Well that explains it!”

The Decoder’s Card 33, Smear Pre-emptive, describes the move: undermine someone’s support before she needs it, so that when she does, nobody is there. The rumor kept Doralee from the only people who could have told her she wasn’t imagining things. It died the day she and Violet talked.

3. Don’t talk to each other

Maria is fired for telling a coworker what she earns. Roz, the assistant who listens under the stalls, is how Hart finds out. Violet’s warning to Judy is a joke and a map: “if you wanna gossip in the ladies room, I’d check first under the stalls for her shoes!”

The Decoder has a card for each half. Card 39, Information Control: “Controlling what you know.” And Card 47, Flying Monkeys, the person recruited to carry someone else’s reach. Roz is not a villain so much as a woman who has chosen the boss’s side, and the film is fair to her: she believes she is being loyal. But notice the rule underneath. The one thing Hart cannot allow is for the people he pays to compare notes, about money or about him. When someone keeps you from talking to each other, the silence is the control.

4. The price of her silence

When Hart learns what the women did, he offers Doralee a trade: a night with him, or he reports all three of them. It is played in the middle of a comedy, and it is sexual coercion: his silence, for her body.

This page won’t linger on it, but it will name it, because the film has her refuse, flatly, and does not ask us to find his offer charming. The Decoder’s Card 22, Sexualized Dominance, carries a safety check for exactly this. If anyone has ever made your safety, your job or your secret the price of sex, that is not a negotiation. The card says who to tell, and the Resources page lists where to find them.

5. Her escape is two other women

Here is the film’s quiet revolution. Lesson five in this series has always been that a woman escapes one man’s plan by waiting for another: Laura in Sleeping with the Enemy, Vivian in Pretty Woman. In 9 to 5, no man comes. Violet, Judy and Doralee get each other out, and the plan starts where so many of ours did, with three women at Doralee’s house, saying out loud what they would do if they could.

And one of them finds her voice on the way. Judy arrives at Consolidated never having held a job. By the time her ex-husband turns up and tries to tell her what she can do, she has an answer ready: “Don’t you tell me what I can and can’t do! Those days are over!”

6. They changed everything, and he got the credit

Here is where to be honest. The women run the office better than Hart ever did, and the chairman of the board walks in, sees a twenty percent rise in productivity, and congratulates Hart. The reforms were signed in his name, because Doralee forged it. He gets the praise and a trip to Brazil. Violet’s promotion arrives in a line of text before the credits.

It is a joke, and a sharp one, because it is true. The film that set out to prove you can run an office without the boss ends with the boss taking a bow for their work. It is the lesson of the first section again, only this time the women knew it would happen and did the work anyway, because it was never for him. It was for Maria, who got to come back part-time, and for the mothers who could bring their children to work.

That is the refusal this film teaches. You don’t always get the credit. You can still refuse to be kept apart.

Whose Work, Side by Side

	Working Girl (1988)	9 to 5 (1980)
The work	Her idea for the Trask deal	Twelve years of running the floor; the office reforms
Who takes the credit	Katharine, her boss	Hart, twice: her promotion, then their reforms
Who helps her	A man at the top of the company believes her	Two other women
How it ends	She tells where the idea came from and gets it back	The office changes; the credit still goes to him

Working Girl taught that the way back is one woman telling the truth about her own work, and being believed. 9 to 5, eight years earlier, taught something harder and more useful: that the truth gets told when the women stop being kept apart.

If You Grew Up on This

Many of us can still sing the theme song from the first line. Nothing on this page asks you to stop. It is one of the funniest films of its decade, and three women carried it together. The useful thing is to look at it clearly from where you stand now.

Some questions to sit with:

Have you ever trained someone who went on to be promoted over you? What did you tell yourself about it?
Is there a rumor about you, anywhere, that has kept people at a distance you didn’t choose?
Where in your life is it understood that you don’t talk about money, or about the person in charge? Who benefits from that?
Who are your Violet and your Doralee: the people who would tell you that you are not imagining it?
What would you change, if you could sign the boss’s name for a week?

Violet, Judy and Doralee started with a fantasy over drinks. It ended with an office that worked for the people in it.

You’re the audience now. You don’t have to do it alone.