The working woman’s anthem “9 to 5” needed an update. But this?

“Another word for hustle is ‘survival’,” said Tressie McMillan Cottom, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who is pursuing a passionate project on Ms. Parton. Women often take on important caregiving responsibilities in addition to paid work and “micro-entrepreneurship,” she says. We have to recognize it, but, she added, “we must not value it”.

Professor McMillan Cottom noted that she was struck by the main character in the commercial – a Puerto Rican woman, actor Tanairi Vazquez, whose jostling side is dancing (she’s getting a website). At least that’s a little accurate, she said. Women of color, especially black women and Latin women, have always had to scramble – and suffer the brunt of job losses during Covid-19.

“This ad talks about a demographic that I’m not sure currently exists in the pandemic,” said Marianne Cooper, a sociologist at Stanford and author of “Cut Adrift: Families in Insecure Times”. “It’s great to scramble to make your dreams come true. It’s another if you have to push yourself around just to get out of it.

Ms. Parton’s original hymn was about solidarity among working women. He had “that kind of ‘Take this job and push it’ tone,” said Joan C. Williams, a workplace researcher. She said the song, which came out when she was in law school, “showed me that Dolly Parton was a gun.”

The update – even though Ms Parton didn’t write the lyrics this time around – could speak more about each woman’s grim reality for herself.

The 9to5 organization, which is the subject of a new documentary, began in 1973 with a group of 10 young office workers in Boston who made less than $ 3 an hour and did not receive a pension. Many had trained the men who would become their bosses.

They started handing out brochures in women’s rooms in local offices and meeting over coffee, drafting a bill of rights for office workers, which included things like equal pay, job descriptions. post and respect. On National Secretaries Day, they staged a protest – attempting to “take back” the party by declaring that they wanted “raises, not roses.”