THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT
Karen Nussbaum
“I have had the opportunity to fight the good fight my whole life and to do that with wonderful people.”
Organizer. Activist. Labor leader. Author. Co-founder of 9to5, the National Association of Working Women and District 925, Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Director of the Women’s Bureau, U.S. Department of Labor during the Clinton Administration. Founding director of Working Women’s Department, AFL-CIO. Founding Director, Working America.
Interviewed by Judy Waxman, August 2020
Photo 1. At 9to5’s first National Secretaries’ Day Rally at the Government Center in Boston, 1974. Photo 2. With Jane Fonda, 1975. Photo 3. Director of Working America, 2014. Photo 4. From the 2020 documentary 9to5: The Story of a Movement, by Oscar winners Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert.
More About Karen:
- 9to5: The Story of a Movement co-director Julia Reichert with NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell at AFI DOCS June 30, 2020.
- Working America
- 9to5
- The Women’s Media Center
- The Zero Hour with RJ Eskow 2018
- Heather Booth introduces Karen Nussbaum, VFA Event – Labor & the Women’s Movement, St. Louis, MO, September 27, 2014
- Laura Flanders speaks with Working America Director Karen Nussbaum 2013
- The MAKERS interview
- “A Sense of Possibility and a Belief in Collective Power”: A Labor Strategy Talk with Karen Nussbaum by Lane Windham
- Working Women Count!
- On C-SPAN
- Statement of Karen Nussbaum Before the Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations, December 1993
- Select Publications and Articles
- Nussbaum, Karen, “What Do Swing Women Voters Want,” American Prospect, 2/10/20
- Nussbaum, Karen, “Unions and Democracy,” Labor Studies Journal, 12/15/19
- Nussbaum, Karen, “Class Consciousness Comes to America,” American Prospect, 10/29/18
- Nussbaum, Karen, “Rebuilding the Working Class,” Dissent, Summer 2018
- Windham, Lane, Knocking on Labor’s Door, 2017. Chapter 7, 9to5: Framing a New Doorway
- Cobble, Dorothy Sue et al, Feminism Unfinished, 2014, featured in 2: The Women’s Liberation Movement
- Papers
- Cited in Barbara Love’s book, Feminists Who Changed America, page 77