Description: Karen Nussbaum, Organizer and Activist. Founder of 9to5, founding director of Working America. Writes about women, labor, politics.
Photo by Steve Cagan 9to5: The Story of a Movement. This acclaimed documentary, 9to5: The Story of a Movement, by Academy Award winning filmmakers Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar reveals the vibrant but largely forgotten working women’s movement of the 1970s with lessons for today.
Karen became friends with Jane Fonda when they worked together in the Indochina Peace Campaign to end the war in Vietnam in the early 1970s. Jane’s response to Karen’s stories about organizing working women was to make a major motion picture. She decided to make it a farce after talking with 40 members of 9to5 in Cleveland, Ohio. Because the film was tied to a movement it created a sea-change in fight for working women’s rights. Jane later joined Karen on the board of Working America Education Fund.
Karen was the president of District 925, SEIU for two decades, organizing clerical and office workers, and was on the SEIU Executive Board. She went on to the AFL-CIO in the mid-90s, where she started the Working Women's Department and then served as assistant to the president until 2018.