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My first gig, week one: A thirtyish woman I'll call Jackie--cute in a Jennifer Aniston kind of way, smart enough to act busy when the boss is scoping, someone I might even lunch with--sashays into my new cubicle. She smiles, coos over my family photos, laughs, pauses for effect at just the right moments, then asks how my work is going. My instincts say don't trust her. Week four: The same woman stops by my desk and starts whispering, while ducking beneath the cube wall, about how she had discovered two months into her yearlong stint there that she had been "majorly gypped" in the salary department. I nod but say nothing. "How did you do on money?" she asks casually. I grin and change the subject. But that afternoon in a weak moment over our first lunch together, I reveal a salary range that I'd "heard" a newcomer might command. "Oh, if you make anywhere near that," she says with a smirk, "you're already doing better than anyone here." Week six: I stop by the office's shared printer to search for a memo of my own and instead find another, a request from my new friend to our boss, making the case for a 30-percent raise. Fair enough. But wait. Her current salary--which she had actually had the bad judgment to write down in the memo--was already double my own.

Fast-forward to nearly a decade later. Eight girlfriends and I--a sister circle that includes an attorney, a toll-booth collector, a flight attendant and a corporate executive--are sharing tales from the front lines at work. After they heard how I had been hoodwinked, the workplace woes these women had been nursing came pouring forth. A brick ceiling that couldn't be cracked with a jackhammer. The leggy blonde who wooed the boss and snagged the lucrative promotion. The preweave or postbraid stares from White colleagues. The everyday slights born of flat-out ignorance. The burden of engaging with office mates about everything from race riots in Los Angeles to Black psycho snipers near the nation's capitol.

When it comes to work, it's just like Mama said: Black folks have to pedal twice as hard to make it half the distance. And we're often carting extra baggage, too. When you slide into a room wearing fly knee-high boots, might your colleagues assume you're just an affirmative-action case on stilts? Yes--and they'll also believe that you cheated some poor White guy out of his job. Will other women ostracize you when you score the corner office they crave? Get comfy at your table for one. In these lean times, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that one in ten Blacks in the labor force is unemployed, could the job you're holding on to--and yes, hallelujah, I know you're grateful--also be moving you toward dementia? And if so, just how much power do we have to stop the madness?

The Problem: A Workload That Won't Quit

A friend I'll call Kate (this and other names have been changed) confided that five years ago, after she'd taken on what she thought would be her dream job--as a manager at a public-relations firm in Philadelphia--she quickly became overwhelmed by the workload. Her workdays stretched to 16 hours, and even after carting home a briefcase every evening and clocking all-nighters a couple of times a month, she was so deep in paperwork she'd given up on ever seeing the surface of her desk again. Her four children--then 13, 9, 8 and 3--had grown used to her being cranky and snippy. Her husband, who was out of a job and spent his days scouring the `Net for positions and shuttling the kids to school and activities, was fighting his own depression and couldn't offer much solace. Their sex life was nonexistent, and some days Kate and her husband barely even spoke to each other. Night after night, Kate crawled home and climbed into bed, too exhausted even to undress.

A year and a half into the job, Kate's hair started falling out. "It would be shedding by the handfuls every morning," she remembers. Her physician confirmed that the hair loss was stress-related. So were other symptoms. "My face was broken out, my back hurt, and I had stopped taking the time to fix myself up every day," she says. "I looked in the bathroom mirror one morning and said, `This has got to stop.'"

It finally did, six months after her husband landed a new job, but not before Kate faced some hard truths about her own contribution to the crisis. "Yes, the amount of work was insane," she says now. "But once when I was sitting in my office watching the sun rise yet again, I realized that I'd been in this exact same spot in almost every job before. I was the ultimate yes-woman."

The Solution: Learn How to Say No

A therapist Kate consulted helped her understand that she took on too much at work because she feared she wouldn't measure up, that she needed "to stay five steps ahead of the ax" to prove her worth. "The irony was that while I was taking on all these projects and spreading myself so thin, I ended up looking irresponsible anyway, because I wasn't meeting my deadlines," she says.

Now let's keep it real here: We all know that you do have to stay "five steps ahead of the ax" at work. Maybe you're not on some quest to prove your value to yourself or your boss; you're just on a mission titled Keep Your Job. Or maybe, like my pal Teresa, you've mired yourself in so much debt that you're doing double time so you can one day escape to a slower work pace and a simpler life.

Whatever your story, Patti Breitman has one word for you: no. "It's generally not advisable to say no to an assignment that is your responsibility," says Breitman, coauthor of How to Say No Without Feeling Guilty. "But you can relieve some of the pressure by encouraging your boss or coworkers to meet you halfway." For example, when you're given an assignment that can't possibly be completed by the requested deadline, invite the other person into the planning process by saying "With all my other projects looming, I might not be able to get to this on time. Can we talk about priorities?"

The Problem: Disappearing Downtime

For Andrea, a 38-year-old mother in Atlanta, the diciest work drama involved not just saying no to more work, but saying yes to her most valuable assets: her husband of 16 years and their two children. "We spent more time with our coworkers than we ever spent with each other and with the boys," Andrea says, "and I finally decided that just wasn't okay with me anymore."

The Solution: Dare to Downsize

By the time their elder son was 8, the couple were so committed to reclaiming some family time that they paid off a $12,000 credit-card debt in ten months, then closed all but one of their credit accounts. Andrea could then quit her $75,000-a-year job as a mechanical engineer. She curbed her penchant for afternoon Pottery Barn sprees and began selling Mary Kay cosmetics from home to supplement her 40-year-old husband's modest teaching salary. "If you want a different life, you sometimes have to step out and make a drastic turn," says Andrea, who now socks away about $200 a month in savings to avoid having to make work decisions based solely on finances. "I won't front--I do miss the extra cash, the frills, the cute Jimmy Choo shoes every season," she says. "But none of what I had before made up for the exhaustion I felt every night for almost ten years. Now when my boys come home, I can be there for them. That makes it all worthwhile."

The Problem: Too Little Pay

Unfortunately, most of us don't feel able to follow Andrea's example. We'd rather suffer with more work than we can handle than risk a smaller payday. In part, that's because too many of us still find ourselves holding the short end of the pay stub. According to the Census Bureau, working women of all races make only 76 cents for every dollar our male counterparts make, bringing us losses of more than $250,000 over a 30-year career. For Black women, the wage disparity is even greater. Decades after literary great Zora Neale Hurston first declared the Black woman "da' mule of da' world," we continue to haul our share of the workload but take home just 65 cents for every dollar carted off by White men. In short, we're getting ripped. Bigtime.

Lonnie, 33, of San Francisco can attest. The freelance television producer discovered that two other producers, both White males, were out-earning her for the same assignments. "I was sitting around one day, listening as they talked about how much they were making, and I started doing some calculating," she says. With a little snooping, she eventually learned that she was making almost $100 less for the exact same project!

The Solution: Know Your Worth