Planet Money - Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5,” the true story behind the anthem (bonus)

Episode Date: August 30, 2026

The brilliance of "9 to 5" is that it is catchy even though it’s also kinda depressing. You will be dancing along. You're enjoying it. And, then when you really listen to the lyrics, you're like, Wait, this is messed up. This is real. This is a problem we need to fix. Like, why does it have to be this way?That is the spirit of the song, why it became an anthem, and the heart of the movie 9 to 5. There’s so much to say about Dolly Parton, about her music, acting career, her business savvy, not to mention Dollywood. Today though, we wanted to bring you the audacious true story of 9 to 5, the movie and the song. Between the 1960s and 1980s, there was a real sense that big workplace changes were just beyond the horizon. At the time, a very common job for women was clerical work. In 1973, a group of secretaries in Boston formed a women's labor organization. They called themselves the "9to5."Today on the show, we revisit our 2021 episode where we meet the women behind the movement that inspired the movie. And a look at how far we have — or haven't — come since then.This is a special Sunday bonus episode. For our latest episode on inventing new tomatoes, scroll down the feed or click here. (Note: This episode originally ran in 2021.)Read:  - Our book: Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life  - Our weekly longform Planet Money newsletter - Our weekly Indicator round-up newsletterFollow:  - Instagram - TikTok - YouTube - FacebookSupport public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org.Today's episode was hosted by Sarah Gonzalez and Sonari Glinton. The original episode was produced by Nick Fountain and James Sneed and edited by Mitra Kaboli. The update was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler, and engineered by Jimmy Keeley. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money’s executive producer.Music: "9 to 5," "5 to 9," and "Fly on the Wall." See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hey, it's Sarah, and this is a bonus Sunday episode because, as we all know, Dolly Parton has sadly passed away. And there's so much to say about her music, her acting career, Dollywood, her business savvy. Today, though, we have the renegade true story behind Dolly Parton's 9 to 5 anthem. The song was for a movie, and I did not know this before I worked on this episode. The song movie were based on real people and a real labor movement formed by a group of secretaries in Boston. We spoke with them and learned how the song and movie and the real life movement all started to feed into each other. This was all recorded back in 2021, but please enjoy my true delight watching Dolly Parton in this movie and how much all the people we interviewed love, love, love

this song. But before we turn to our Dolly appreciation, I just want to say, do not let this bonus episode take the place of our usual Friday episode. It is there waiting for you. It is all about the quest to turn tomatoes, basically all fruits, into brands you will pay more for. We hear from the food scientist creating a new type of cherry tomato. It's supposed to be a lot better. And this episode may just change how you see fruit at the grocery store. Scroll down in the feed to find it. Okay. Here you are. 95. This is Planet Money from NPR. All right. All right. So you have your snacks? Okay, I have my snacks.

Well, I actually have a chicken pot pie. A chicken pot pie as your movie snack? Yeah. I got string cheese, goldfish crackers. And I haven't seen this film. That is going to change today. Because we are watching 9 to 5, the movie during the workday, the way it was meant to be watched. Okay.

Ready? Three, two, one play? Tumble out of bed and it stumbled to the kitchen. Pour myself. I don't even think I knew that 9 to 5 the song had a movie. I thought it was a song. What you gotta love is like a long opening credit set. I'm excited.

I'm getting into it. Well, welcome to the front lines. Lily Tomlin, I love her. Oh, I wanted to ask you about my salary. Rue Jean Fonda looks so. Good. She always looks good. Mr. Hart, I've told you before I'm a married woman.

Dolly Parton is in it? This is her debut film. Okay, Sarah, here's what you've got to know. About 9 to 5. Okay. It is truly a movie of its era. It's one of the first movies that was set in the work world. It's about clerical workers, secretaries,

a workforce which in 1980 was predominantly women. Most of the bosses were men. which leads to all sorts of problems. Dorley, please. Look, I want you. Oh, for heaven's sake. What are you doing, Mr. Hart? A little sexual harassment in the workplace.

Well, like, it gets worse. So they've gotten to men being promoted over women when they're not as qualified, getting coffee for the guy. What I love about this film is that they take these issues and they handle them with comedy. The problems are played for laughs, like the main plot of the film,

getting revenge against your boss. Lily, Jane, Dolly, their characters all get high one day and fantasize about killing their boss. They end up kind of accidentally tying him up one day. And while he's tied up, they take over the business. They're running things. By the end of the movie, the boss gets free. He shows up at the office. And with the women in charge, the workplace looked totally different.

What are all these people doing here? It's not even nine o'clock. It's called flexible hours. People set their own time. Well, some work eight to four, some work 10 to six, some work nine to five. Not less absenteeism. People really like it. They make a bunch of workplace improvements.

There's a daycare center at work, flexible hours, equal pay, and they all end up sticking. Well, except the equal pay. That one was never going to stand a chance. Yeah, exactly. But the others do stick. So at the end of the film, Lily, Jane, and Dolly, they all pop champagne. And Tinsworthy luck to what we did. Yeah, everything except that part about the money.

What are we going to do about that? Hey, we've come this far, haven't we? This is just the beginning. This is just the beginning. And here's to the beginning. Oh, no. Nothing changes. Nothing changes.

Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Sunari Glinton. And I'm Sarah Gonzalez. And Sunari, the reason you wanted me to watch this movie is because 9 to 5 is not just a movie. Exactly. For the women who watched it, there was a real true feeling that the changes they saw on the big screen would lead to changes in the actual world. Today on the show, the story of how 9 to 5 The Movie, 9 to 5, the song even, started with a group of secretaries in Boston. 9 to 5, the movie, was based on real workplace experiences, and it all started with a woman named Karen Nussbaum.

I was very active in the anti-war movement and in the... newly blooming women's movement. And I got a job to support my activism in the kind of work that most women did in those days. And that was as a clerical worker. This is the 1970s. And something really big was happening around this time. Millions of women were entering the workforce. This is during the Vietnam War.

In the 70s, women in the labor force increased by 12 million. And a lot of women were clerical workers. There were 18 million clerical workers by the end of the decade. If you ask somebody who was a typical worker in America, they most likely say a man in a hard hat. But in fact, literally the most typical worker in America was a woman at a keyboard. Now, Karen was just doing clerical work to, you know, pay the bills. Her real passion was protesting the Vietnam War. So one day Karen is at this anti-war conference and she runs into one of the biggest movie stars at the time and perhaps the most famous Vietnam War protester.

I saw Jane Fonda sitting on the floor just participating like anybody else. And it made a big impression on me. Karen and Jane Fonda end up teaming up protesting the Vietnam War together. Jane would like sleep over at Cairns. I lived with five other women in an apartment that was a mess. She stayed in somebody's waterbed. We had meetings in our living room. And every once in a while, I'd think,

Oh, Jane Fonda, major motion picture star, is sitting in my living room. Once the war ended, Jane Fonda returned to acting. And Karen, you know, Karen's an activist. And now that the war is over, she starts noticing all these things about the office that she didn't really, really notice before. There was this casual chauvinism that just popped up all of the time. At first, Karen and some of her car, co-workers started meeting regularly talking about their workplace problems.

And then they realized that women all over Boston were doing the exact same thing. So they decide to start a formal labor organization. And what do they decide to call it? Well, at the time, the workday for clerical workers was 9 to 5. So we just picked the hours of the day and called it 9 to 5. And we had an organization of nurses inspired by 9 to 5, which called themselves 7 to 3. Because that was their organization. Rolls right off the tongue, 7 to 3.

No one says 7 to 3. 9 to 5 is the phrase. Thank you so much, Karen, for the much better phrase. Now, at first, Karen says 9 to 5, the labor organization, started with what felt like painfully small issues. We started with job posting. You should at least know when they're not. there was a job opening in your company. That's still a problem.

Yeah. Nine to five, the organization starts spreading across the country more and more chapters. And it leads to a local union in Boston, SCIU Local 925. Get it, 925. Pretty soon, Karen and the 9 to 5 women are demanding and getting higher pay at big institutions. They help pass the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. And a big priority for Karen was to have fun. with all of their campaigns.

One of the very first things 9 to 5 instituted was the pettiest office procedure contest and the bad boss contest. And you would be amazed at the things that these guys asked these women to do. What's the pettiest? Yeah, what was the pettiest? Oh, my gosh. We had a guy who asked his secretary to sew up a hole in his pants while he still had them on. I was going to ask not while he was still wearing them, of course. Yes, while he was still wearing them.

And you may think that I made that up, except for that when we gave him the award, it was on television. He went on television with the secretary. Wait, how did you, you would invite the petty boss to come on TV to win the Petty Boss award? And they were like, sure, I would love to. They didn't even have enough sense to know that they should be embarrassed. We had a guy who gave his secretary his beeper and sent her to the pub, the bar, downstairs from their office. And if she saw a woman who met his specification, she was supposed to beep him. Now, you might think that that's a made-up story, too, except for that was on Phil Donahue.

We got the boss and his secretary on the Phil Donahue show. Using daytime talk shows like Phil Donahue, millions of women across the country could see themselves in the office workers on television, which sort of made people go, hold on a second, this is ridiculous. And it made them feel like they could actually call out their own bosses. I know my mom watched a lot of filled down here. And seeing the craziness out in the open on television helped propel the woman's worker movement. This whole time, Karen, she stayed in touch with Jane Fonda, and she'd tell Jane about the things

she was hearing from her fellow office workers. And Jane Fonda said, I want to help. Jane came to me and said, you know, I'd love to support 9 to 5 in the best way I know how. And that's by making a major motion picture. So I thought, whoa, great. Jane Fonda's like, let's write up a real pitch. I'll shop it around to the film executives. Karen thinks the best angle to pitch is just the sheer number of clerical workers.

She writes, office workers haven't seen themselves represented in pop culture almost ever. And there are almost 20 million of us. You'd have a built-in audience film executives, a built-in audience of almost 20 million people. The movie studio, 20th Century Fox, approves the idea. Now Jane had to figure out what the movie was going to be about. She starts meeting with workers from Karen's group,

the original 9 to 5, to get ideas. And there's this pretty important meeting. That's the big aha moment. Jane's meeting with about 40 workers in Cleveland hearing all their complaints. And long into the meeting, Jane at one point says, now, has anybody here ever dreamed of killing your boss? And the room just lit up because everybody had dreamed about getting even with their boss and told story after story about the kinds of things that they'd like to do to their boss. And it was those stories that became the basis of the movie.

At this point, Jane decides this is a movie about getting back at the man. So they have a movie studio, they have stars, they have a premise, all they need now is a script. In comes a young 26-year-old rising star. She's a writer, Patricia Resnick, and she hears that Jane Fonda, a hero of hers, was producing a movie. She knew that she had to be a part of it. So she gets a meeting with Jane Fonda. When I went to meet with her at her house, she had stacks and stacks of, uh, files. And so I felt that my job was to come up with a compelling story and characters you could

root for and a boss that was, you know, as close as you could get to the mustache twirling villain. Problem was, even though Patricia had plenty of non-glamorous jobs, including waiting tables, she had never had a clerical job. So the movie studio, 20th Century Fox was like, you want to learn about office culture? We got a place for you. Montchreier Insurance Company in downtown Los Angeles. It was a, you know, a giant whole floor of secretaries. And as soon as you walked in, you saw, oh, all the underlings are female and all the bosses are male. There was not one female in an upper level position.

Patricia spent weeks hanging out with the secretaries, taking them to lunch, listening to their stories. and slowly the characters for the movie begin to emerge. One woman in particular kept coming up in all these lunches. Everyone was absolutely sure she was sleeping with the bus. I was a tiny bit afraid of her. And anyway, I took her out to lunch last and got a couple of martinis into her. That's when people used to drink at lunch. I didn't bring it up.

I didn't feel comfortable bringing it up. But she told me that she knew that everyone. Everybody thought she was sleeping with the boss. And, you know, he was letting them think that, but it was completely untrue. And she started to cry. And, you know, I had no proof either way, but I absolutely believed her. This real-life worker inspired the character played by Dolly Parton. So you've been telling everybody I'm sleeping with you, huh?

Well, that explains it. That's why these people treat me like some dime store bluesy. They think I'm screwing the boss. Dolly Parton's star turn made the idea of sexual harassment a central part of the movie. But the phrase basically didn't exist yet. Sexual harassment, those words are never used in the movie. We didn't even have a term for it because it was just this thing that men did that we didn't like. Patricia subtly inserted huge workplace reforms into the script.

Like at the very end of the movie, after the women have instituted all these new workplace programs, The boss's boss, the big boss, he shows up. Like, wow, you've been so productive, Frank. Frank Hart. My boy, I would like to shake your hand. You managed to create a very, very splendid environment here. Like the job sharing program. Job sharing.

Of course, the boss has been literally tied up in a harness, the whole movie, and didn't do anything. But he takes all the credit. So you pulled it off, Frank. Well, I like to think we did anyway. Good. Like the daycare center. Daycare center. Our working parents love it.

The cost was minimal. It's cut down on absenteeism, and we had a wonderful time doing it. Well, Frank, I got to give you credit. That equal pay thing, though, that's got to go. All right. Well, here's an irony. A director named Colin Higgins gets hired to direct the movie. Yes, apparently you needed a dude to direct the movie about women.

And this guy, well, he ends up pushing out Patricia Resnick. He wouldn't let me on the set. He didn't want me around. You know, he gave me that every ship has one captain's speech. So I kind of got nine to five on nine to five. When you say nine to five done nine to five, there is a plot line in which the man takes credit for other, for the women's work. That's like a theme. Correct.

A theme in the movie. Right. And that's exactly what happened to me. there was a whole documentary about Colin Higgins that talks about 9 to 5 endlessly. I'm never mentioned. There have been other documentaries more recently. I'm never mentioned. And it's galling, you know?

Is that like a, there's something, I don't know what word you would use for it, but there's some weird poetry in that idea. Yes, your poetry is my galling. After the break, we see just how far the influence of Hollywood goes in the real world. It's not much. It's not great. Like almost none. On December 19, 1980, Karen Nesbaum, who started 9 to 5, the organization, goes to a dark theater to watch 9 to 5 the movie on the big screen. The opening credits start, the song comes in, you know the song.

Can you tell me, as someone who's leading nine to five, the union, it has to be a crazy moment the first time you hear that song. That you hear it dun, dun, the, the song was thrilling. Karen wasn't sure people would like the movie, but then there was this scene. The copy machine is shooting papers everywhere. Jane Fonda's character doesn't know how to stop it. And a woman not far down the row from me, stands up and yells, push the stop button. You could just feel the electricity in the room because all of the women there are totally in this movie.

They see themselves. Nine to five is the second biggest box office hit that year. Right after Star Wars, the Empire strikes back. Jane and Karen go on a tour with the film and they're screening the movie in a bunch of theaters, having huge worker rallies and using the song especially to promote organizing office workers. It became a cultural phenomenon far beyond Hollywood. After the movie, the number of 9 to 5 chapters doubles and the union expands. Both groups are still active today.

And both lobbied to pass marquee employment protection laws, like the Family Medical Leave Act and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. But for Karen, there was something more subtle that they all accomplished also. So nine to five, the movement was the start of women being perceived differently in the workplace. They were starting to be treated more as professionals, less likely to be asked to sew up their boss's pants. More likely to say no if someone did ask them to do that. The movement from the 1970s had a massive effect on the way women think of ourselves. We have built generations of self-confident women who take care of ourselves. But Karen really thought there would have been more progress made over the last 40 years.

The main issues that 9 to 5 fought for, there's still a problem today. Child care, sexual harassment, equal pay. The pay disparity is largest for women of color. Now, I want to acknowledge for a moment that this is a movie about white women. Shout out to Maria Delgado for holding it down for all the women of color in the entire movie. Shout out, Maria Delgado. Now, in many ways, Karen says, We've actually gone backwards.

You know, Karen has spent almost 50 years in the labor movement. She ran the union. She was in the Department of Labor. And she says the period right after the movie, the 80s, undid a lot of the progress made in the 70s. When we started first organizing at 9 to 5, I never expected that we would see fewer people without sick days, that we would see fewer people without paid leave. I certainly thought we would have paid maternity leave. Karen blames the decline in labor protections on union participation. When the movie came out, almost 25% of U.S. companies were unionized.

Today, it's about 10%. I think our job now is to make sure that this coming decade is not a repeat of the 1980s. In 2021, Dolly Parton released an updated version of her original song. It is called Five to Nine, an ode to all the extra hours women have to work. She can certainly write a catchy tune, but Jesus, depressing. That's sort of the brilliance of this whole nine to five thing. Like you're like dancing along, you're enjoying it. And then when you really listen to the lyrics, you're like, wait, this is a little messed up.

Like, why does it have to be this way? And thus the greatness of Dolly Parton. Okay. Do not miss our Friday episode about the invention of a new type of tomato and why the produce section at all of our grocery stores is starting to look, I don't know, little fancy, you know, sungolds and cuties and all that. We have the story of what it takes to make a new fruit that you can trademark and where the money from that goes. Scroll down in the Planet Money fee to find that episode. Today's bonus show was produced by Nick Fountain and James Sneed and edited by Mitra Koboli. Sonari Glinton was my co-host.

He has a new book coming out called Blackonomics. We can find more, including how to pre-order if you Google Blackonomics and Sonorik Vinton. As always, thanks to our NPR Plus supporters who get bonus episodes and sponsor for you listening. I'm Sarah Gonzalez. This is NPR.