50 Fun Facts About Workplace

The word 'salary' traces back to the Latin name of which seasoning, also the root of 'salad' and 'sausage'?

Salt gave Latin 'salarium', the pay of Roman soldiers, though the popular claim that legions were paid in the stuff itself is baseless.

Which country star clacked her acrylic fingernails to make the typewriter beat of the office anthem '9 to 5'?

Dolly Parton earned an Oscar nomination for '9 to 5', the title song of the 1980 comedy that gave her a first film role beside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin.

Which company sells the Post-it Note, born when an employee wanted a bookmark that would stay put in his hymn book?

3M chemist Spencer Silver had made the weak glue by accident, and colleague Arthur Fry found its use in 1974. The yellow came by chance: it was the only scrap the lab next door had.

Which symbol of American women in wartime factories began as a 1942 song by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb?

Rosie the Riveter was a hit song first. The famous 'We Can Do It!' poster, made for Westinghouse, was never called by that name during the war.

Casual Friday grew out of a 1960s campaign by garment makers to get printed shirts into offices in which U.S. state?

Hawaii's shirt makers gave two aloha shirts to every state legislator, then won 'Aloha Friday' in 1966. The habit spread east through California and around the globe.

What is Homer Simpson's main job in Sector 7-G of the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant?

Safety inspector is Homer's steady role, though he held more than 188 other jobs in the first 400 episodes of The Simpsons.

Which small caged birds did coal miners carry underground as living alarms for carbon monoxide and other toxic gases?

Canaries kept that job in British pits until 1986, when electronic gas detectors finally replaced them.

Which office word named a boundary in Civil War stockades like Andersonville that captives were shot for crossing?

Deadline meant a do-not-cross line inside the stockade wall, cited at the trial of Andersonville's commander. Newspapers gave the word its time-limit sense by 1919.

Bette Nesmith Graham, a secretary whose son joined The Monkees, mixed which office product in her kitchen blender?

Liquid Paper began as tempera paint she called 'Mistake Out' and poured into old nail polish bottles. She sold the company to Gillette in 1979 for at least $47.5 million.

Which carmaker stunned rivals in 1914 by more than doubling factory pay to five dollars a day?

Ford's five-dollar day ended the constant staff turnover on its assembly lines. In 1926 its factories also moved to a five-day, 40-hour week.

Which Secretary of Labor, appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, was the first woman to serve in a U.S. Cabinet?

Frances Perkins handed Roosevelt a long list of programs she would fight for, from Social Security to a minimum wage, then served until 1945.

Katharine Graham, the first woman to run a Fortune 500 company, published which newspaper during Watergate?

The Washington Post had been handed by her father to her husband rather than to her. Her memoir of running it, Personal History, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998.

Mary Barra, who joined as an 18-year-old co-op student, became the first female chief executive of which carmaker?

General Motors made Barra the first woman to lead a major automaker in 2014. Her first year in charge brought 84 recalls covering more than 30 million cars.

Madam C. J. Walker, listed by Guinness as America's first self-made female millionaire, made her fortune selling what?

Hair care products were her answer to her own scalp ailments and baldness. Born Sarah Breedlove, she had earlier worked as a laundress for barely more than a dollar a day.

Whose equal-pay lawsuit against Goodyear inspired the first bill that Barack Obama signed into law as president?

Lilly Ledbetter had spent 19 years as a supervisor at the tire maker when an anonymous note told her she earned thousands less each year than the men in her job.

Which workplace metaphor, coined by Marilyn Loden in a 1978 speech, was later studied by a U.S. federal commission?

Glass ceiling caught on so widely that Congress set up a Glass Ceiling Commission in 1991 to study what keeps women and minorities out of senior corporate jobs.

Which economist was the first woman to chair the Federal Reserve and later the first to serve as Treasury Secretary?

Janet Yellen is also the first person to have led all three of the government's top economic bodies: the Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

Which Navy rear admiral and COBOL pioneer worked on the Harvard computer famously halted by a moth in a relay?

Grace Hopper's colleagues found the insect in 1947 and taped it into their logbook, which is now kept at the Smithsonian.

Which 2013 book by Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg urged women to assert themselves at work and at home?

Lean In sold 4.2 million copies in its first five years and lent its name to LeanIn.Org, the foundation Sandberg set up.

Which Texas cosmetics founder bought a pink Cadillac in 1968 and made the car a reward for her top sellers?

Mary Kay Ash started her company in 1963 after being passed over for a promotion in favor of a man she had trained.

Which former head of the Screen Actors Guild fired more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers as U.S. president?

Ronald Reagan gave the strikers 48 hours to return in 1981, then dismissed 11,345 of them and banned them from federal service for life.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, scene of a deadly 1911 fire in New York, made which item of clothing?

Women's blouses, then called shirtwaists, were cut and sewn there. Stairwell doors were kept locked to stop theft and unauthorized breaks, and 146 garment workers died.

The photo 'Lunch atop a Skyscraper' shows eleven ironworkers on a beam during the building of which New York landmark?

Rockefeller Center staged the 1932 picture as a publicity stunt for its new RCA Building, with the men posed 850 feet up on the 69th floor.

Which 1906 Upton Sinclair novel about Chicago meatpacking workers shocked Congress into passing pure food laws?

The Jungle was written to win readers to socialism, but its slaughterhouse scenes turned their stomachs instead. 'I aimed at the public's heart,' Sinclair said, 'and by accident I hit it in the stomach.'

Which 1938 New Deal statute created the U.S. minimum wage and 'time-and-a-half' overtime pay?

Fair Labor Standards Act raises reached 700,000 workers at a stroke, and Franklin Roosevelt called it the most important New Deal law since Social Security.

The 401(k) retirement plan, pioneered by consultant Ted Benna, is named after a section of which federal law?

Internal Revenue Code section 401(k) struck Benna as a way to cut the tax on a bonus plan for bank executives, so he built one of the first such plans at his own firm.

Which president signed Labor Day into federal law in June 1894, during the Pullman railroad strike?

Grover Cleveland was among those who feared a May 1 holiday would strengthen socialist and anarchist movements, so the first Monday of September won out.

Which folk hero of American song won a race against a steam-powered drill, only to die with a hammer in his hand?

John Henry was a 'steel-driving man', pounding drills into rock so that explosives could blast out railroad tunnels.

Martin Luther King Jr. gave his final speech in Memphis in 1968 while supporting a strike by which city employees?

Sanitation workers walked out after two colleagues were crushed in a garbage compactor while sheltering from the rain. Their placards read 'I Am a Man'.

Which fictional company employs Michael Scott as manager of its Scranton branch in the American sitcom The Office?

Dunder Mifflin is the American stand-in for Wernham Hogg, the firm in the British original. Its logo ended up on display around the real downtown Scranton.

In the comedy Office Space, mumbling collator Milton has which beloved red desk item confiscated by his boss?

Stapler maker Swingline sold no red model when the film came out, so the prop was spray-painted. Fans asked so often that the company launched a real one in 2002.

Which actress played Miranda Priestly, the feared editor of Runway magazine, in the film The Devil Wears Prada?

Meryl Streep said she built the icy boss from men she had known, not from Vogue's Anna Wintour, whom she first met at a pre-release screening.

Which actress won an Oscar as the mill worker who stands on her work table with a 'UNION' sign in Norma Rae?

Sally Field's character was drawn from the life of Crystal Lee Sutton, a real textile worker turned union organizer.

Which disco star wrote 'She Works Hard for the Money' after meeting an exhausted restroom attendant at a Grammys party?

Donna Summer met Onetta Johnson at the restaurant Chasen's after the 1983 Grammys, and put her name into the song's first verse.

Which New Jersey rocker became 'the Boss' because he collected his band's nightly pay and shared it out?

Bruce Springsteen earned the name as a young bandleader paying his bandmates. The E Street Band has been his backing group since 1972.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show followed single career woman Mary Richards at the WJM newsroom in which Midwestern city?

Minneapolis was Mary's fresh start after a broken engagement. CBS ruled out a divorce, fearing viewers would think she had left Rob Petrie of The Dick Van Dyke Show.

Which singer took 'Take This Job and Shove It', written by David Allan Coe, to number one on the country charts?

Johnny Paycheck never had another chart-topper. Coe was annoyed that people assumed the singer had written it, although the record credited him as composer.

In the thriller Severance, which company's office staff undergo a procedure splitting their work and home memories?

Lumon Industries is a sinister biotechnology firm whose 'severed' staff, among them Adam Scott's Mark, recall nothing of the office once they leave it.

Which Renaissance artist is sometimes credited with the first résumé, a letter to Milan's ruler Ludovico Sforza?

Leonardo da Vinci filled the letter with what he could do in engineering and weapon design, and only mentioned that he could also paint.

Which Japanese term for death from overwork had its first reported case in 1969, a 29-year-old newspaper worker?

Karoshi translates as 'overwork death'. That first victim worked in the shipping department of Japan's largest newspaper company and died of a stroke.

The word 'boycott' comes from an English land agent ostracized by his tenants and neighbors in 1880 in which country?

Ireland's Land League isolated Charles Boycott so thoroughly that fifty outside volunteers, guarded by over 1,000 police, had to harvest his crops. Saving £500 of produce cost about £10,000.

Robert Propst designed the Action Office, the system that introduced the cubicle, for which American furniture maker?

Herman Miller made it a bestseller, but Propst came to regret what followed, calling 'the cubicle-izing of people in modern corporations' a 'monolithic insanity'.

The word 'freelance' is credited to which Walter Scott novel, where it describes a medieval mercenary warrior?

Ivanhoe used 'free-lance' for a fighter whose lance was sworn to no lord, not one who fought for nothing. Journalists had borrowed the word for themselves by 1882.

Which office technology was in commercial use in France in 1865, eleven years before the telephone was invented?

Fax machine ancestors really are that old: Italian physicist Giovanni Caselli's pantelegraph ran the first commercial telefax service, between Paris and Lyon.

Muriel Siebert joined 1,365 men in 1967 as the first woman to own a seat on which financial institution?

New York Stock Exchange membership needed a sponsor, and nine of the first ten investors she asked refused her.

Which suffragist opened Wall Street's first female-run brokerage in 1870 and ran for U.S. president two years later?

Victoria Woodhull ran the firm with her sister Tennessee Claflin. They were helped by Cornelius Vanderbilt, who admired her skills as a spirit medium.

Which co-founder of the United Farm Workers did Cesar Chavez credit with inventing the slogan 'Sí, se puede'?

Dolores Huerta is widely credited with the phrase, which means 'yes, we can'. She had started the union's forerunner in 1962 with Chavez and fellow organizer Gilbert Padilla.

Which packaging material began in 1957 as a failed attempt to make three-dimensional plastic wallpaper?

Bubble Wrap never caught on for walls, but in 1960 it found its calling cushioning IBM's new 1401 computers on the way to customers.

Leslie Knope, played by Amy Poehler in Parks and Recreation, is a devoted civil servant in which fictional Indiana town?

Pawnee is her great love, so she is horrified to learn she was born in rival Eagleton, because raccoons had overrun her hometown's hospital.

Which Irish-born union organizer, dubbed 'the most dangerous woman in America', led a 1903 march of mill children?

Mother Jones took up organizing after yellow fever killed her husband and four children and the Great Chicago Fire destroyed her dress shop.