Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (48)

In the Council on International Educational Exchange [C.I.E.E.] office, the ratio of male to female office employees was about equal in the 1970's. But the white women in their late 20's or early 30's who had obtained some of the middle-class professional jobs the C.I.E.E. needed to fill seemed more interested in their careers than in becoming romantically involved with any of the men who worked at C.I.E.E.--especially, given the classist way they generally viewed men who did not have middle-class professional jobs like they now had.

Yet a few of the white women in their 20's, who were hired a few months after me for the summer clerical work that was needed during the busiest July and August months of the student travel season, were friendlier and seemed more open to becoming romantically involved with their male clerical working-cass office colleagues than were the women who held the "professional" jobs at C.I.E.E..

For a few weeks, one of these female co-workers who sat at the desk right across from me seemed eager to flirt with me at work, when the telephone wasn't ringing. But after she got the hint from hearing the political conversations that Marvin and I were having in the office and the humorous freak left counter-cultural critique I was articulating of how the unhip executives at C.I.E.E. and all U.S. social institutions were involved in exploiting working-class people and needed to be replaced by a 1970's freak/hip youth revolution that created a more leisure-oriented economic system and society (which used technology and computers to free people from having to work 9-to-5, rather than to eventually create a new type of "techie billionaires" or to eventually eliminate millions of clerical and secretarial office jobs that, at least, provided many working-class people with the money they needed to pay rent to their landlords or repay their mortgage loans to their banks), she became less interested in flirting with me.

Perhaps she felt that her family's class interest/privileges would be threatened by the kind of societal changes Marvin and I were discussing, since the reason she had been hired for her C.I.E.E. summer job was because, coincidentally, her father was then one of the top executives at the C.I.E.E. office? Also, she may have felt embarrassed, after she heard Marvin and me joke about how nepotism was prevalent in the U.S. capitalist economic system when it came to which people were hired for the softest and most high-paying jobs (and even for summer jobs), by the fact that she, herself, seemed to provide an example of the nepotism that Marvin and I were joking about.

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (47)

Conversing with Marvin about the world situation, U.S. politics and U.S. society, while we both were spending our days chained to the same Council on International Education Exchange [C.I.E.E.] 9-to-5 workplace cage, did make the time at the job pass by faster; despite our particular political differences over what kind of revolutionary left strategy or revolutionary left political groups had the best chance to take political and economic power away from the imperialist U.S. capitalist ruling class, whose policies we both regarded as morally wrong, anti-humanistic and anti-democratic.

And, as a result, despite his Labor Committee/Labor Party membership, Marvin became an ally in attempting to raise the political consciousness of the other co-workers in the C.I.E.E. student travel office room in which we both worked.

When one of the other office workers in his early 20's, Glen, for example, expressed some irritation at the way Carol--who was his immediate supervisor--kept piling her work onto him in her bullying, authoritarian way, both Marvin and I laughed and reminded Glen that "that's how capitalism works." And by the end of the summer travel season in late August, all the C.I.E.E.  office workers in our office cage pretty much agreed that the kind of 9-to-5 clerical jobs which the older generation of bosses were offering the baby boom generation in their 20's once they left high school or college were totally unsatisfying and a waste of our lives.

One of the white office workers in his 20's who began his seasonal job at C.I.E.E. a few months after I did-- and who was hired despite still having a beard and long-hair and looking like a campus youth ghetto counter-cultural freak/hippie--noted that "Everyone I knew from college is bored stiff with whatever plastic 9-to-5 job they end up getting in the office building world. So things are bound to change for the better by the 1980's." 

But, aside from Marvin and me, none of the dissatisfied white office workers in their 20's seemed to have the faintest idea of how they collectively might go about ever attempting to create a new economic society or system; in which they wouldn't have to spend their 20s and 30's in the 1970's and 1980's having to do menial clerical office work for the culturally-straight, often less-educated, unhip elderly folks in their late 40's, 50's and 50's--who usually were the ones assigned to be their immediate supervisors.