The Camas-Washougal Post Record
April 10, 1974
Zellerbach Program
Woman Easily Adjusts to Supervisor Promotion
By Laurel Hume
POST Staff Writer
Editor’s note: This is the final story in a series on the Affirmative Action Program at Crown Zellerbach.
Jana Moon never expected a promotion to be a shift supervisor in the Crown Zellerbach bag factory.
“It was one of the biggest surprises in my life,” she said. Her promotion to the first woman shift supervisor in the bag factory was announced last November, when the supervision structure was re-organized.
Moon has been working in the bag factory since 1946, and as a relief supervisor for a year and a half before her promotion. She’s supervising 25-30 people.
Describing her work as “doing what I’m supposed to do,” Mrs. Moon sees that employees are working, checks the quality of bags produced, settles inter-employee problems and deals with any machinery and materials complications. The job now involves more mental than physical work, she said.
If there has been any change in the employee attitudes since her promotion, it has been for the better, Mrs. Moon said. “I think it’s because I’ve become acquainted with more of them.”
Feeling accepted on the job, she isn’t self-conscious as a woman supervisor. “I’ve been a woman all of my life. On the whole, men are real respectful at home and at work.”
Her husband Donald, who heads the CZ shipping department, “hasn’t had much to say one way or the other,” about the promotion, Mrs. Moon said.
“People ask about having two bosses in the family, but I say we’ve always had that.”
Commenting on the Affirmative Action program at CZ, Mrs. Moon said, “It’s a problem to get people who are qualified in jobs. I don’t think a woman should be forced on a job if she doesn’t want it.” Women shouldn’t have to lift heavy loads, Mrs. Moon added.
The stated goal of Affirmative Action is to “affirmatively seek in every possible way to recurit members of minority groups as employees of the company and to move them into all levels and locations of the organization.”
Although Mrs. Moon listens to what women’s liberation leaders have to say, she doesn’t always agree.
“Lib has hurt the women in the labor force more than the women who began the liberation movement,” she said. Liberation leaders began changes that have gone through the government and hurt women at the Camas mill, she believes.
