Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (29)

Eventually, I left my Parts Department shipping clerk-typist job at Bulova when I found a more interesting travel season long-term temporary clerk-typist job in Manhattan with the Council on International Educational Exchange [CIEE]. Aside from Walter and, in part, Claudia, none of the other workers I met at Bulova seemed to be on the same cultural and philosophical wavelength enough with me for me to feel I would ever have much to talk about with them--once the initial novelty of them listening to my "outsider" philosophical post-scarcity hippy/freak rap/counter-cultural critique of their work situation started to wear off.

The guys in their 20's who worked in the larger upstairs mail room/shipping department room, who had all never attended college, did start to grumble a bit when the office managers below and above them initially installed surveillance cameras in the larger mail room/shipping department room, to insure that they all spent each minute there working--on the pretext that "stealing" of some Bulova clocks and Bulova watches by employees had been discovered during an inventory and surveillance cameras were required to prevent such "theft". But since they lacked a union to protect them from any managerial disciplinary action, it still seemed unlikely that their grumbling meant that they would be able or willing to risk losing their jobs by protesting more openly and collectively or by engaging in some kind of job action/labor protest action.

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (28)

I can now only recall two of my co-office workers in the upstairs office where I had my desk at Bulova. One was a white woman clerk in her 30's whom most men would have likely considered physically attractive, who was married (and whose children were probably then in elementary school) to a culturally straight white guy, who had some kind of blue-collar working-class job, yet wasn't anti-capitalist or leftist, philosophically. The other was a white woman in her early 20's named Claudia, who was also married, but who didn't have children yet and who seemed somewhat in touch with an apolitical version of late 1960's and 1970's rock music and youth culture.

Most men likely found the dark-haired Claudia physically attractive. She was also friendly and seemed like someone who had smoked or was continuing to smoke pot with her husband on weekends. She reminded me somewhat of some of the young, apolitical and non-intellectual white working-class women I had been physically attracted to in the late 1960's, when I was a student activist at CUNY's experimental upper-division college, Richmond College, on Staten Island.

So after bumping into Claudia outside of the Bulova office building a few times when we happened to have boarded the same IRT subway car on either a morning commute to or evening commute from work, I actually did write a folk song that expressed how I was starting to feel attracted to Claudia. But after her husband picked her up after work one day in his car--and I realized that he was her husband and not just a current boyfriend--I pretty much quickly stopped singing my "Claudia's Song" when I practiced my guitar at home. 

I never mentioned to her that I had written a folk song for her. And, within a few years, I had both lost the song lyric sheets and had totally forgotten the melody and words of  "Claudia's Song" forever. I guess I hadn't spent long enough practicing the song for it to become engraved in my memory for life. 

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (27)

On the days when I was caught up with my shipping out of the required replacement parts to jewelers and jewelry stores  in the downstairs Bulova building basement and remained at my desk in the upstairs office, catching up on my paperwork, I was sometimes able--when the assistant supervisor who guarded us office workers was either out to lunch or at a meeting on a different floor--to break down the robot-like workplace discipline of the other white office workers. I would walk from my desk to the other side of the office floor, where their desks were located and start conversing with them about their lives and about how much of a drag 9-to-5 work and wage-slavery was. Office workers in this Bulova office--like in many other office workplaces in the 1970's--were not yet all separated from each other by cubicles/boxes as they all would later generally be by the middle of the 1980's

The 1970's were still close enough to the affluent 1950's and 1960's post-war "golden age" of U.S. capitalism and U.S. imperialism, during which many U.S. white working-class people felt they had escaped forever from the possibility that their newly-gained post-war relative economic affluence would ever be endangered again by future capitalist recessions and depressions. So the white Bulova office workers had still mostly not yet developed the post-1980's "economic depression mentality," which caused most white U.S. workers to become more fearful about losing their paychecks under capitalism than they were about losing their leisure and free time to 9-to-5 wage slavery (as their parents had).

Thus, my fellow white office workers responded to my "rap" somewhat positively, and also began to stop working like robots and started to talk to each other, whenever the assistant supervisor who guarded them was out to lunch or away from her desk in order to attend a meeting on a different floor.

Another reason I probably found it easier to break down the robot-like office work discipline somewhat at Bulova when I worked there was because the 1970's were still close enough to my days as a 1960's New Left activist/hippie freak organizer. So the long-term psychological impact on my personality of having to be a 9-to-5 wage slave for decades in order to obtain my apartment rent money each year had not yet become evident.

And thus, I probably still possessed more residual 1960's charm, friendliness, spontaneity and encounter group-type emotional openness (and less caution about exposing my inner feelings and dissident philosophical/political views to other employees) in the way I approached other white workers in the 1970's than I possessed during the last two decades of the 20th-century and in the 21st-century, as I aged as a U.S.white wage-slave.

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (26)

By the 1970's, Walter had become almost as disillusioned with the 1960's generation of young Black militant student activists as he was with his white co-workers at Bulova.

"They all talked a good game of Revolution in the 1960's. But where are they now in the 1970's? Most of the Black student militants of the 1960's seem to have just given-up once they left college," Walter complained one afternoon.

"Maybe you can't really blame people for giving up after the Nixon administration's repression and the killing of so many Black Panther Party activists," I replied.

"Yeah. I know about that. And that's why I still have the gun I bought in the 1960's in my house. But if the Black youth have given up and the white workers are still unwilling to fight inter-racially alongside Black workers against the System in the 1970's, there's no possibility of any kind of Revolution anymore in the 1970's. And I'll probably be stuck here as a wage slave for the rest of my work life. Although maybe by the time you're my age, you won't," Walter sadly said.

"Hopefully, when the older white workers start retiring and the hipper white workers of my generation start replacing them, more white workers will be willing to fight inter-racially alongside Black workers," I quietly replied.

Walter laughed. "I doubt that.  I haven't seen much evidence that the younger ones they hire here are anymore interested in fighting the System than are the older ones."

Walter's impression of how potentially rebellious the white workers at Bulova  were was similar to my own impression.

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Although Bulova operated some kind of jewelry or watch repair-related vocational school for disabled military veterans either within the same Bulova building in which I worked or in an attached building, I can't recall ever bumping into any of the disabled military veteran-students. The white, uniformed security guard in the Bulova building lobby was friendly and appeared to be in his 50's or early 60's. He apparently was hired to both greet Bulova employees and visitors each day and to make sure that Bulova workers didn't leave the building with any stolen Bulova clocks or watches each evening.

Working downstairs in the basement stockroom where Walter spent his whole day was,more interesting for me than was the time spent working in the office upstairs, not surprisingly, because Walter seemed more hip politically, culturally and intellectually to what was going on in the world than did the white office workers around me in the office upstairs.

At first, Walter was careful about indicating how politically radical and intellectually hip he was, since he assumed that I lacked anti-racist consciousness, just like all the other white workers at Bulova that he had personally encountered at his work workplace lacked anti-racist consciousness. But once Walter realized that I hated Nixon as much as he did and I was as familiar with 1960's Civil Rights Movement history and African-American history as he was, Walter felt it was cool to to make his afternoon at work in the Bulova basement more interesting and pass by more rapidly by conversing with me in an honest way.

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My morning hours as the Bulova Parts Department Clerk would be spent sitting behind an office desk, and opening up envelopes and reading the letters mailed by the various U.S. jewelers and jewelry stores or jewelry department mangers that indicated which clock or watch replacement parts they required.

In the 1970's, business firms and stores were still generally not using either faxes or emails to communicate with each other, and long-distance calls between business firms and stores were still generally more costly than was the price of a u.s. first-class postal stamp.

After reading each letter from a jeweler, a jewelry store or a jewelry department manager, I would then indicate on a Buloval parts order form which replacement part was being replaced and type in the name and address of the jeweler, jewelry store or department store to which the replacement part was to be delivered; and on the Bulova parts order form I would also indicate what were the total charges (including the shipping costs) for the replacement parts order .

Then, after returning from my 12 noon to 1 p.m. lunch hour break, I would gather up the order forms that I had worked on in the morning and take the typed-up forms with me down to the Bulova basement, where its watch and clock replacement parts stored and where any defective Bulova watches or Bulova clocks that jewelers were unable to repair themselves would be repaired by an African-American worker in his late 40's named Walter--who spent his whole day working in that same Bulova basement location.

And after I gathered and packed in boxes all the replacement parts which the various jewelers and jewelry stores or jewelry department managers had requested that day, I would finally put all the boxes in a shopping cart at around 4:30 p.m., roll the shopping cart to the elevator and take the elevator up to an upper floor where the shipping and mailing department was located.

In the shipping and mailing department around 7 guys in their twenties, who didn't seem to have attended college, collectively spent the most of their whole workday mailing out boxes of new clocks and watches to Bulova's various store customers around the U.S, besides mailing out the boxes of replacement parts that I brought to them at the end of the day.

And after delivering the boxes to the shipping department upstairs, I brought the now-empty shopping cart back downstairs to the basement, before returning to my desk in the upstairs office at around 4:45 p.m. for the last 15 minutes of the workday.. 

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (23)

Before the 1980's, if you were the first culturally-straight looking white person to telephone in response to an employer's want ad in a local New York City newspaper's classified section, you could often still get offered the job immediately by the employer, without the employer even checking your references, if--after interviewing you--the employer felt you would "fit in" and be able to learn the work quickly; and if the employer needed somebody to do the work right away and could picture you as being the one doing it.

And since the ex-Long Island Railroad worker had suddenly quit his Bulova Parts Department Clerk job to return to his LIRR job after its strike ended, Bulova was in need of somebody to hire right away; and being both the first person to answer its classified want ad and being white and young (and looking culturally-straight and "corporate"in a suit and tie and without a beard or long hair), I was hired right away as its new Parts Department Clerk. But only after first being interviewed by a well-dressed, culturally-straight-looking white woman in her late 20's in Bulova's upstairs personnel office department on the 3rd floor; and then sent downstairs to the assistant supervisor of the Parts Department--a white woman in her 50's who wore glasses and was not as well-dressed or as fashionably-dressed as the younger woman in the personnel office had been.

The main function of the Parts Department Clerk in my work area of Bulova's building in Woodside, Queens was to respond to the requests of jewelers and jewelry stores around the U.S.A.--who sold and repaired Bulova watches and Bulova clocks-- for replacement parts for Bulova-manufactured watches and Bulova clocks. Ironically--since I still considered myself a New Left "movement" activist in the 1970's--the most common clock replacement part that jewelers and jewelry stores around the U.S.A. requested, was called the "Movement" part of the Bulova clocks. And the second most requested replacement part was for the "pendelums" of the Bulova wall clocks.