Another reason I was able to get some of the other Council on International Educational Exchange [C.I.E.E.] office workers to start thinking about how boring and empty the 9-to-5 workweek pattern was for those of us who had been economically compelled to accept the menial or flunkie clerical jobs, in order to obtain the rent money that the greedy New York City landlords ripped off each month from their tenants, was that at C.I.E.E. there was also actually another office worker there who was a politically conscious, anti-capitalist, leftist working-class intellectual. His name was Marvin and he worked at the desk next to mine.
While it wasn't that unusual to find co-workers in the 1970's within the clerical workplace offices of the Manhattan skyscrapers who were liberal Democrats in their politics, by the 1970's it was already rare to find co-workers, white or Black, who were revolutionary socialist, revolutionary communist or revolutionary anarchist in their political beliefs, in the workplaces inside Manhattan's skyscrapers.
And by the 1980's, it often seemed like all the New Left white radicals of the 1960's and early 1970's who were from white upper-middle-class or white upper-class backgrounds had made a collective decision to only seek middle-class professional jobs, academic university jobs, managerial jobs or high-wage unionized labor-aristocrat blue collar or union bureaucracy jobs; rather than collectively getting jobs within the Manhattan skyscraper office work world. Or rather than at least attempting, like I was, to politicize, radicalize and encourage the unionization of all of the unorganized, non-unionized, low-wage clerical office workers whose labor was being exploited each day within these Manhattan skyscrapers.
Saturday, October 10, 2015
Monday, October 5, 2015
Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (44)
I was able to make some progress at the Council on International Educational Exchange [C.I.E.E.] in getting the people who, like me, were still in their 20's and who had attended U.S. colleges during the late 1960's and early 1970's, to realize the degree to which having to now do 9-to-5 office work in the culturally straight off-campus U.S. capitalist world of the 1970's represented both an absurdity and a deep loss in their personal freedom.
One reason I was able to make some progress was that the desks in the C.I.E.E. office were both adjacent to or facing each other and not divided up into separate, walled-off cubicles; and all the desks in the student travel department in which I worked, except for Steve's department supervisor's desk, were located within a not too large a room. So it was a lot easier to converse and flirt with my fellow office workers at C.I.E.E. than it would become later in the late 1970's and 1980's, when nearly all the Manhattan office workers were blocked off from each other and imprisoned between 9-to-5, inside the cages of a cubicle.
One reason I was able to make some progress was that the desks in the C.I.E.E. office were both adjacent to or facing each other and not divided up into separate, walled-off cubicles; and all the desks in the student travel department in which I worked, except for Steve's department supervisor's desk, were located within a not too large a room. So it was a lot easier to converse and flirt with my fellow office workers at C.I.E.E. than it would become later in the late 1970's and 1980's, when nearly all the Manhattan office workers were blocked off from each other and imprisoned between 9-to-5, inside the cages of a cubicle.
Thursday, October 1, 2015
Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (43)
What made me glad that the Council on International Educational Exchange [C.I.E.E.] clerk-typist job was just a temporary travel season job and not a permanent one was that there was one catch to it: Although Steve, the department head, seemed somewhat hip culturally and related to people in a non-authoritarian, egalitarian way, the assistant supervisor in the department--a white, culturally straight, humorless woman in her 30's named Carol (who wore glasses and who would not likely have been considered physically attractive even by most culturally straight men) who supervised me--related to the workers she supervised in an authoritarian way.
Ironically, Carol's way of supervising her female and male "underlings" resembled very closely the managerial style that the U.S. radical left feminist women of the 1970's then criticized U.S. male managers for using, when relating to the women workers they supervised.
But as the months went by and the speed in which I completed typing my assigned passenger manifests increased, the time I had to converse with my co-workers increased. And one result was that the C.I.E.E. office conversation and atmosphere became more to reflect the general concerns about the meaningless of the baby-boom generation's 9-to-5 workweek life, under the current U.S. economic capitalist set-up, that the 1960's counter-culture had raised.
So the assistant supervisor, Carol, probably began to feel more isolated on the job and left out of the office conversation that the younger, less culturally-straight workers in the office were having; in part due to the kind of "meaningless of work" conversation/discussion I was bringing into the office each workday.
And when the department supervisor, Steve, wasn't watching, she seemed to react to her growing sense of being left out of the office conversation, by continuing to supervise me in an uptight, authoritarian, out-of-date, unpleasant way, whenever she needed me to type some new passenger manifest for her.
Then, when Steve somehow contracted hepatitis in the middle of the summer and wasn't around the office awhile to checkmate, when possible, Carol's bullying assistant supervisor managing style, the catch and negative aspects of my C.I.E.E. clerk-typist travel season job became even more obvious and pronounced.
Ironically, Carol's way of supervising her female and male "underlings" resembled very closely the managerial style that the U.S. radical left feminist women of the 1970's then criticized U.S. male managers for using, when relating to the women workers they supervised.
But as the months went by and the speed in which I completed typing my assigned passenger manifests increased, the time I had to converse with my co-workers increased. And one result was that the C.I.E.E. office conversation and atmosphere became more to reflect the general concerns about the meaningless of the baby-boom generation's 9-to-5 workweek life, under the current U.S. economic capitalist set-up, that the 1960's counter-culture had raised.
So the assistant supervisor, Carol, probably began to feel more isolated on the job and left out of the office conversation that the younger, less culturally-straight workers in the office were having; in part due to the kind of "meaningless of work" conversation/discussion I was bringing into the office each workday.
And when the department supervisor, Steve, wasn't watching, she seemed to react to her growing sense of being left out of the office conversation, by continuing to supervise me in an uptight, authoritarian, out-of-date, unpleasant way, whenever she needed me to type some new passenger manifest for her.
Then, when Steve somehow contracted hepatitis in the middle of the summer and wasn't around the office awhile to checkmate, when possible, Carol's bullying assistant supervisor managing style, the catch and negative aspects of my C.I.E.E. clerk-typist travel season job became even more obvious and pronounced.
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (42)
To book a cheaper seat on one of the almost daily cheaper Council on International Educational Exchange [C.I.E.E.) summer travel season flights between Europe and the USA in the 1970's--only a few years before all the travel agencies started using computers (and, subsequently, the internet)-- a passenger would have to telephone in his or her credit card number or mail in his or her check in advance to C.I.E.E. to reserve a seat on a particular C.I.E.E. flight. And, in addition, if passengers were travelling back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean as part of a group, then the group leader would have to arrange a group booking of seats on the C.I.E.E. charter flight.
Since each C.I.E.E. charter flight to Europe or back from Europe required a passenger manifest (in an age before the word-processing and computer technology replaced the need for clerk-typists to do such work), C.I.E.E. needed a fast and accurate clerk-typist each travel season to rapidly type-up the names and addresses and phone numbers of the 200 to 300 passengers (that were each written on large individual index cards for each passenger) who flew on each day's charter flight. And typing up this information on the passenger manifests each day, as well as providing information about the departure and arrival times to the many confused passengers or would-be passengers who telephoned the C.I.E.E. office each weekday, was the work I was hired do at C.I.E.E.
The C.I.E.E. job was a softer clerical-typist type of job than the Bulova job had been and paid more; and, overall, the other workers in the office in which I worked seemed somewehat more oopen to supporting an eventual radical change in the whole 9-to-5 work world set-up and for-profit-for-the corporate rich purpose of the U.S. economic system. In addition, spending my lunch hour in Midtown Manhattan again during workweeks was, indeed, generally more interesting than having to spend it in Woodside, Queens in the neighborhood around the Bulova building.
Yet it still was a drag having to get my rent money by sitting in the C.I.E.E. office between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. each day (except on the frequent days when the IND E or F train delays meant that I didn't arrive at work until 9:20 a.m.), typing up passenger manifests, answering phone calls and conversing with the other C.I.E.E. workers during the long periods when I had finished typing up each day's new passenger manifest and there were no telephone calls to be answered. But when conversing with my co-workers I would also try to break down office morale and provide them with a political/class analysis of the sociological roots for their job dissatisfaction/boredom ; and indicate, obliquely, why a Revolution in the USA was still needed in the 1970's.
Since each C.I.E.E. charter flight to Europe or back from Europe required a passenger manifest (in an age before the word-processing and computer technology replaced the need for clerk-typists to do such work), C.I.E.E. needed a fast and accurate clerk-typist each travel season to rapidly type-up the names and addresses and phone numbers of the 200 to 300 passengers (that were each written on large individual index cards for each passenger) who flew on each day's charter flight. And typing up this information on the passenger manifests each day, as well as providing information about the departure and arrival times to the many confused passengers or would-be passengers who telephoned the C.I.E.E. office each weekday, was the work I was hired do at C.I.E.E.
The C.I.E.E. job was a softer clerical-typist type of job than the Bulova job had been and paid more; and, overall, the other workers in the office in which I worked seemed somewehat more oopen to supporting an eventual radical change in the whole 9-to-5 work world set-up and for-profit-for-the corporate rich purpose of the U.S. economic system. In addition, spending my lunch hour in Midtown Manhattan again during workweeks was, indeed, generally more interesting than having to spend it in Woodside, Queens in the neighborhood around the Bulova building.
Yet it still was a drag having to get my rent money by sitting in the C.I.E.E. office between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. each day (except on the frequent days when the IND E or F train delays meant that I didn't arrive at work until 9:20 a.m.), typing up passenger manifests, answering phone calls and conversing with the other C.I.E.E. workers during the long periods when I had finished typing up each day's new passenger manifest and there were no telephone calls to be answered. But when conversing with my co-workers I would also try to break down office morale and provide them with a political/class analysis of the sociological roots for their job dissatisfaction/boredom ; and indicate, obliquely, why a Revolution in the USA was still needed in the 1970's.
Saturday, September 26, 2015
Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (41)
By the time I was working in places like Bulova or the Council on Educational Exchange [CIEE] in the 1970's, the New Left Movement of the 1960's seemed so far in the past or so far underground that I no longer saw it as politically useful or productive or relevant to discover "who ruled Bulova?" or "who ruled CIEE?" or what sociological or economic role Bulova or CIEE played in serving the special interests of the U.S. corporate elite, as I had done in relationship to Columbia University in the 1960's.
So although I worked at Bulova and CIEE in the 1970's, like most of the other fellow workers there, I never learned or discovered much about how either Bulova made most of its money or why CIEE was established by its founders.
With regard to CIEE, from all that I could see, its main mission in the 1970's was to provide a cheaper way for mostly upper-middle-class professors, college administrators and students at U.S. and Western European colleges and universities to spend their summer vacations in either Europe (if from the USA) or in the USA (if from Western Europe)--in a period when an individual regular passenger jet plane ticket on a U.S. commercial airline flight or European national airline flight was much more relatively expensive than it became in the 1980's. CIEE accomplished this by arranging, on a non-profit basis, to charter various airline planes to fly back and forth to Europe during the Summer that were filled with mostly CIEE-affiliated college students, professors and administrators--along with tourists who, on their own, had discovered that CIEE-charter flights were cheaper than the regular commercial airline flights at that time and also more reliable than the student agency-run charter flights at that time.
So although I worked at Bulova and CIEE in the 1970's, like most of the other fellow workers there, I never learned or discovered much about how either Bulova made most of its money or why CIEE was established by its founders.
With regard to CIEE, from all that I could see, its main mission in the 1970's was to provide a cheaper way for mostly upper-middle-class professors, college administrators and students at U.S. and Western European colleges and universities to spend their summer vacations in either Europe (if from the USA) or in the USA (if from Western Europe)--in a period when an individual regular passenger jet plane ticket on a U.S. commercial airline flight or European national airline flight was much more relatively expensive than it became in the 1980's. CIEE accomplished this by arranging, on a non-profit basis, to charter various airline planes to fly back and forth to Europe during the Summer that were filled with mostly CIEE-affiliated college students, professors and administrators--along with tourists who, on their own, had discovered that CIEE-charter flights were cheaper than the regular commercial airline flights at that time and also more reliable than the student agency-run charter flights at that time.
Saturday, September 12, 2015
Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (40)
During most of the time when I had the Jamaica basement apartment to myself, I obtained my rent money by working as a temporary clerk-typist in a travel season job with the Council on International Educational Exchange [CIEE] in Midtown Manhattan, which was then located in a building that was about 9 or 10 stories high, about a block from the United Nations Building in UN Plaza.
After I had decided it was time to escape from my Bulova parts department clerk-typist job in Woodside, Queens for some job in Manhattan, I looked through the New York Sunday Times' classified want ads section on the Sunday before a Monday that I had arranged to take off from work, noticed the Council on International Educational Exchange [CIEE]'s classified want ad for a "student travel agency" clerk-typist position, dressed up in a suit and tie early Monday morning, took the subway to Grand Central Station, and telephoned from inside a coin-operated phone booth the CIEE personnel manager's phone number at 9:05 A.M. to arrange for a job interview at 10:00 A.M. that same morning.
The personnel manager in charge of hiring the temporary travel season clerical and clerk-typist office workers at CIEE in the 1970's was an elderly white woman with white hair, who appeared to be in her early 60's. Despite being culturally straight-looking and dressed up when she went to work, she seemed to be liberal and somewhat intellectual. When interviewing me for the CIEE temporary clerk-typist position, she sounded like someone who had been college-educated in the 1930's at one of the elite women's colleges, like Radcliffe, Wellesley or Smith College.
Probably because I was the first applicant for the temporary travel season clerk-typist job to telephone in response to CIEE's New York Sunday Times classified want ad, still looked young enough in my 20's to match the looks of most of the Western European and U.S. white students who reserved seats on CIEE's summer charter flights each year and typed about 60 wpm with no mistakes on the 5-minute typing test she gave me, the CIEE personnel manager immediately sent me to be interviewed by the supervisor of the CIEE department in which I would be working. He was a friendly, clean-shaven white guy in his late 20's, who still looked kind of hip, named Steve.
Steve then explained to me what work tasks the job involved and told me that I should call the personnel manager back the following day. It probably did not hurt my chances of being told--when I called back the following day--I was hired and could start working for CIEE on the following Monday, that I was white. But my impression was that both the CIEE personnel manager and Steve were liberal enough in their politics/racial attitudes to have been willing to hire an Afircan-American clerk-typist position applicant in the 1970's, if that person had been the first person to respond to CIEE's classified want ad for the position--even in the absence of adequate U.S. government or New York State enforcement of non-discrimination in employer hiring practices or affirmative action in hiring laws during the 1970's.
Sunday, September 6, 2015
Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (39)
About five months after I moved into the Jamaica basement apartment as his roommate, Barry decided--since he was getting bored with his dead end job as a delivery truck driver in the States, felt his economic opportunities in the post-affluent U.S. economy of the 1970's were limited, and was also not involved sexually with any "chick" in the USA and no longer had any U.S. "chicks" in his "bull pen"--that he was going to join his father and live in Israel/Palestine again, despite having previously felt somewhat culturally alienated from most Israeli youths during his previous time living in Tel Aviv. And after Barry moved from Queens to Israel/Palestine again (although unlike many Palestinians who could not move back to Israel/Palestine despite being born there, Barry had been born in the USA), I was able to live in the Jamaica basement apartment for about five more months without having to share the space with any male chauvinist roommate.
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