“Fed Up”: A Clerical Workers’ Manifesto Sparks a Comparable-Worth Campaign at the University of California at Berkeley, 1970–1974

Abstract: In a union campaign that began in 1970 and ended in 1974, the University of California at Berkeley’s American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 1695’s secretaries published a clerical workers’ manifesto, participated in writing a formal affirmative action report with the librarian’s union, and filed a mass grievance against sex discrimination signed by three hundred clerical workers. Significantly, they rallied against sex discrimination with the slogan “equal pay for equivalent work.” Their campaign not only preceded the first comparable-worth campaign in 1978 in San Jose, California, but was linked directly to it through Local 1695 activists and their activism. This article complicates the origin story for the late-twentieth-century comparable-worth movement and highlights Local 1695’s partnership with librarians in crafting what historian Katherine Turk has called an “expanded interpretation of sex equality law.”