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.

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (46)

Discovering  that Marvin, a culturally straight-looking white guy in his mid-to-late 20's, was a "closet communist" who considered himself a revolutionary communist in his politics, was a treat--at first.
But after a few weeks of discussing each other's take on U.S. capitalist society in the 1970's and the 1970's U.S. left, however, I realized that--besides not being that sympathetic to the freak/hip left/yippies' insurgent counter-culture--Marvin's conception of revolutionary leftism had led him to be a 1970's member of Lyndon Larouche/Lynn Marcus's Labor Committee/Labor Party sect.

During the 1970's, LaRouche's Labor Committee/Labor Party sect was then presenting itself as a revolutionary communist political alternative to all the other U.S. Left groups and sects, which it characterized as a non-revolutionary "swamp left"; and it apparently viewed the Communist Party USA [CPUSA] group as its main competitor for potential organization recruits and new members in the 1970's. And for this reason, Labor Committee/Labor Party members somehow then felt justified in staging physically violent attacks on CPUSA members to disrupt CPUSA group meetings, as part of its "Operation Mop-Up campaign to establish Labor Committee/Labor Party/Lyndon LaRouche leadership and control of the 1970's insurgent U.S. Left.

Naturally, I rejected the "Operation Mop-Up" politics of the group that Marvin did political work with at night and on weekends, when not being a 9-to-5 wage-slave at the Council on International Educational Exchange [C.I.E.E.]--where his wage day job involved helping to especially book the C.I.E.E. charter plane flights between New York City and Paris that were being reserved mainly for French students--under the supervision of a jolly white woman, who seemed to be in her 50's, who spoke French fluently, like a native of France; and who spoke English with a French accent.

Also, having personally observed the negative and disruptive political role that Lynn Marcus/Lyndon LaRouche's Labor Committee members had played around Columbia University's campus in the months following the April and May 1968 Columbia student rebellion--in opposition to Columbia SDS's New Left activists and the Black Panther Party--there was little chance that I would be won over to Marvin's strange brand of leftism. No matter how hard he might try to recruit me, once he discovered that I was the only other office worker at C.I.E.E. who probably understood the leftist wavelength he was on intellectually and philosophically at that time.

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (45)

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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.