ABSTRACT
In the period of the 1960s through the 1980s, the Bell System produced films and videos for use in implementing affirmative action programs. Affirmative-action plans at Bell recruited, trained, and sought to promote traditionally underemployed and segregated members of the community and the company, i.e., women and minorities. The Bell programs began in the early 1960s, in conjunction with President Lyndon Johnson’s Plan for Progress, a voluntary plan for workplace racial integration signed by AT&T, Western Electric, and Bell Laboratories. This initial voluntary plan lead to aggressive recruitment, but was not successful in changing occupational segregation; despite the massive hiring of minorities in the 1960s, women and minorities remained in the lowest-paying jobs in the company. 2 This led the government to issue several EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) consent decrees for AT&T and the Western Electric Company in the 1970s. The videos produced within the Bell System to implement affirmative-action management training provide a historical record of how media was simultaneously a part of institutional change and capitalist stasis.
