by Studs Terkel
“I had four years of college in business administration. I worked for Illinois Bell, a fairly decent job. But this was not for me. I had too much energy. I got into business because it was easy. After working awhile, all my beliefs in the corruption of private industry were substantiated. (Laughs.) That turned me off. What’s left? Social service. I quit, hightailed to Washington, and I was accepted in VISTA four days after I got my induction notice. (Laughs.) They got me a 2-A deferment, and miraculously I was not tripping rice paddies.
The most frustrating thing for me is to know that what I’m doing does not have a positive impact on others. I don’t see this work as meaning anything. I now treat my job disdainfully. The status of my job is totally internal: Who’s your friend? Can you walk into this person’s office and call him by his first name? It carries very little status to strangers who don’t understand the job. People within the agency don’t understand it. (Laughs.)
Success is to be in a position where I can make a decision. Now I have to wait around and see that what I say or do has any impact. I wonder how I’d function where people would say, “There’s a hotshot. He knows what he’s talking about.” And what I say became golden. I don’t know if it would be satisfying for me. (Laughs.) That might be more frustrating than fighting for everything you want. Right now I feel very unimportant.
POSTSCRIPT: “While I was waiting for this job I was advised to see my ward committeeman. I was debating. My wife was pregnant. I had virtually no savings. I was gonna get a ten-thousand-dollar job. What was I gonna do? I was all set to work as a taxicab driver. Then I said, ‘I’m going to be a bricklayer. Just come home at night, take a bath, relax.’ I was prepared to call my uncle, who’s a mason. I knew he could connect me, that’s the irony. I was decrying a system that forced me to go to my ward committeeman to get a city job, but I was going to call my uncle to get me at the head of the line to get in the masons union. (Laughs.) One system was just as immoral as the other. By a stroke of luck, my application cleared city hall without my having to go through politics. To this day I’m politically unaffiliated. I don’t know how long that will last. I may have to go to an alderman to get my promotion cleared.
“My goal for the last two years is to be a university professor. He works only nine months a year. (Laughs.) He can supplement his income. What’s a comfortable income? We started out at fifteen thousand dollars—my wife and I—as our goal. We’re up to about twenty-five thousand now. If I have another kid, the goal’ll go to thirty thousand. The way I look at the university professor—aside from his capacity to influence other people—is that the business world often uses him as a consultant. Not bad.
LILITH REYNOLDS
It’s hard for me to describe what I’m doing right now. It may sound like gobbledygook. It’s hard to understand all the initials. It’s like alphabet soup. We just went through a reorganization, which is typical of government. Reorganization comes at a rapid rate these days. My job has changed not only in name but in status.
She has worked for the federal government for nine years. “I work for the OEO. I was assistant to the regional director. I was what’s called the regional council liaison person. There’s something called the Inter-Agency Regional Council, which is made up of five agencies: OEO, HEW, Welfare, Labor, Transportation, and Housing. This group meets once a month.
“Agencies don’t really want to coordinate their efforts. They want to operate their programs their way and the hell with the others. OEO has been unique in that we’ve funded directly to communities without going through other government structures.50
“The regional councils are really directed from Washington. They’re told what to do by the Office of Management and Budget. They are just a little political thing. One of the big pushes was to make better contact with the six governors of the region and the mayors—from appointments secretary to planning staffs to budget departments. Getting the money you need for the programs you want, getting it down to the people. We spent most of our time doing that.
It’s amazing how little information there really is around. How systematically it’s kept from getting around. Some of the Spanish-speaking community groups got fairly good at harassing the regional director. They wanted answers to questions. How many Spanish-speaking people are employed in our office? That wasn’t hard—two. How many are employed by agencies to which we were giving grants? How many people are being served by the programs we’re funding? These were legitimate questions. The way we went about getting the answers was ridiculous. We just couldn’t come up with the statistics. We made an educated guess. It’s hard to change the rules. People take the course of least resistance.
There’s a theory I have. An employee’s advancement depends on what his supervisor thinks of him, not on what the people working for him think. The regional director’s job depends on his friendship in Washington. So the best thing for him to do is not challenge the system, not make waves. His future depends on being nice to the people who are making the decisions to make the cuts that are hurting his employees. So he’s silent. But the people down here, the field representatives, who know what’s going on, make waves. So the director tries to get rid of the most troublesome.
At our office there’s less and less talk about poor people. It’s mainly about how we should do things. I don’t know if this was always so. It’s just more obvious now. Local politicians have more and more say in the programs. In Chicago, Mayor Daley runs it. In other cities, it depends on the power structure. We talk more of local institutions these days, not of poor people.
I have been very active in the union.51 We’ve frequently confronted management with problems we insisted they solve. We tried to get them to upgrade the secretaries. They’re being underpaid for the jobs they’re doing. Management fought us. We’ve tried to have a say in policy making. We’ve urged them to fund poor groups directly. Management fought us.
For instance, the union has backed the Midwest Poor People’s Coalition. We tried to get funds directly to the Chicago Indian Village and a poor group in Indiana. Almost always, the agency has balked. We’ve attacked management because they’re just not carrying out the Economic Opportunity Act.
The employees should help make policy, since they’re closest to what’s going on. It’s probably the same as in auto plants. A lot of times workers can make better decisions about production than managers. The managers aren’t down there often enough to know what’s going on.
Your education prepares you to go into a job and accept what you’re told as being correct. I worked several years for the Social Security Administration. It has a fantastic number of rules and regulations. For a long time I believed they were correct and it was my job to carry out these rules. After I got to OEO it became more and more obvious to me that a lot of these rules were wrong, that rules were not sacrosanct. I think this is happening to workers all over. They’re challenging the rules. That’s what we’re in the process of doing.
Through the union people have been bringing up ideas and management is forced more and more to listen. They hadn’t taken us very seriously up to now. But we just got a national contract which calls for union-management committees. I think our union has challenged management a lot more than most government unions. That’s largely because of the kind of people OEO has attracted. They believe in being advocates of the poor. They believe in organizing people to challenge the system. It’s a natural carry-over to organize a union which also challenges the system.
I’m among the top fifteen people in the decision making process in the office. As the union became more aggressive—it was on the issue of the Indians, the director tried to fire our president—I got into a big hassle. We developed thirty-three charges against the director and made a mass mailing to all community agencies, to all the grantees, to all the senators and congressmen in the region. After that, I was no longer assistant to the regional director. (Laughs.)
That’s another typical thing in government. When management
wants to get rid of you, they don’t fire you. What they do is take your work away. That’s what happened to me. He didn’t even tell me what my new job would be. They sent somebody down to go through my personnel file “My God, what can we do with her?” They had a problem because I’m a high-grade employee. I’m grade 14. The regional director’s a 17. One of the deputy directors told me, “You’re going to be economic development specialist.” (Laughs.)
I’m very discouraged about my job right now. I have nothing to do. For the last four or five weeks I haven’t been doing any official work, because they really don’t expect anything. They just want me to be quiet. What they’ve said is it’s a sixty-day detail. I’m to come up with some kind of paper on economic development. It won’t be very hard because there’s little that can be done. At the end of sixty days I’ll present the paper. But because of the reorganization that’s come up I’ll probably never be asked about the paper.
It’s extremely frustrating. But, ironically, I’ve felt more productive in the last few weeks doing what I’ve wanted to do than I have in the last year doing what I was officially supposed to be doing. Officially I’m loafing. I’ve been working on organizing women and on union activities. It’s been great.
If they would let me loose a little more, I could really do something. We’ve got plenty of statistics to show incredible sex discrimination. Black women have the lowest average grade. White women have the next lowest. Then black men. Then white men. I’m sure these are the statistics for our whole society. We believe that in organizing women we can make changes in all directions. We’ve already started to do that.
There’s no reason why we can’t carry this to the community action agencies. Many of them deal with welfare mothers, with all kinds of households headed by women. If women knew more about their rights, they’d have an easier time. If we could get into the whole issue of law suits, we’d get real changes. My offiice is trying to stop us.
When you do something you’re really turned on about, you’ll do it off-hours too. I put more of myself into it, acting like I’m a capable person. When you’re doing something you’re turned off on, you don’t use what talents you have. There are a lot of people in our office who are doing very, very little, simply because their jobs are so meaningless.
Some of these jobs will appear meaningful on paper. The idea of the antipoverty program is exciting. But people are stifled by bureaucratic decisions and non-decisions. When you’re in the field and get into sticky situations with politicians, you can’t count on your office to support you. You’ll be punished—like having your job taken away from you. (Laughs.)
Since I’ve been doing what I want to do, my day goes much faster. When I was assistant to the regional director, an awful lot of my time was taken up with endless meetings. I spent easily twenty or more hours a week in meetings. Very, very nonproductive. Though now I’m doing what I want to do, I know it’s not gonna last.
I have to hide the stuff I’m doing. If anybody walks into the office, you have to quick shove the stuff out of the way. It’s fairly well known now that I’m not doing any official work, because this huge controversy has been going on between the union and the director. People are either on one side or the other. Most people who come in to see me are on the union side. I’m not hiding the fact that I’m not doing any official work.
I hide the stuff because I feel a little guilty. This is probably my Protestant upbringing. I’ve been work oriented all my life. I can’t go on drawing a paycheck doing what I want to do—that’s my conditioning. My dad worked in a factory. I was taught work is something you have to do. You do that to get money. It’s not your life, but you must do it. Now I believe —I’m getting around to it (laughs)—you should get paid for doing what you want to do. I know its happening to me. But I still have this conditioning: it’s too good to be true.
I’ve had discussions with friends of mine to the right and to the left of me. The people to the left say you shouldn’t take any part in a corrupt system. To give them your time and take money from them is a no-no. People to the right say you have no right to take the taxpayers’ money for doing nothing. You’re not doing official work, therefore you shouldn’t be paid for it.
I feel much less guilty about this than I would have a year ago. I have less and less confidence that management people should be telling me what to do. They know less than I do. I trust my own judgment more. I believe that what I’m doing is important.
What would be my recommendation? I read Bellamy’s Looking Backward , which is about a utopian society. Getting paid for breathing is what it amounts to. I believe we’d be a lot better off if people got paid for what they want to do. You would certainly get a bigger contribution from the individual. I think it would make for exciting change. It’d be great.
The reasons people get paid now are wrong. I think the reward system should be different. I think we should have a basic security—a decent place to live, decent food, decent clothing, and all that. So people in a work situation wouldn’t be so frightened. People are intimidated and the system works to emphasize that. They get what they want out of people by threatening them economically. It makes people apple polishers and ass kissers. I used to hear people say, “Work needs to be redefined.” I thought they were crazy. Now I know they’re not.
DIANE WILSON
She works for the OEO. “This is a section called PM&S. I can’t for the life of me ever remember what it means52 Sometimes they change it. They reorganize and you get another initial. (Laughs.)
“I’m a processing clerk. There are three of us in this one department. We send grants to grantees after field reps have been out to see these poverty-stricken people. The grantees are organizations of the poor. Maybe the Mobilization Center in Gary, where I live—Grand Rapids Poverty Center, something for senior citizens, a day care center. They give ’em all names.
“We mail ’em out forms to sign so they can get the money from Washington. When they return the forms to us there’s another process we go through. We have a governor’s letter and a package in an orange folder that we send out to him. He has to give his consent. We have a little telegram we type up. He approves it or he doesn’t. We send it on. That makes it officials. There’s a thirty-day waiting period. After that time we send out the package to Washington . . .
You wish there was a better system. A lot of money is held up and the grantees who want to know why they can’t get it. Sometimes they call and get the run-around on the phone. I never do that. I tell the truth. If they don’t have any money left, they don’t have it. No, I’m not disturbed any more. If I was just starting on this job, I probably would. But the older I get, I realize it’s a farce. You just get used to it. It’s a job. I get my paycheck—that’s it. It’s all political anyway.
A lot of times the grantee comes down to our audit department for aid. They’re not treated as human beings. Sometimes they have to wait, wait, wait—for no reason. The grantee doesn’t know it’s for no reason. He thinks he’s getting somewhere and he really isn’t.
They send him from floor to floor and from person to person, it’s just around and around he goes. Sometimes he leaves, he hasn’t accomplished anything. I don’t know why this is so. You can see ’em waiting—so long. Sometimes it has to do with color. Whoever is the boss. If you’re in the minority group, you can tell by their actions. A lot of times they don’t realize that you know it, but this has happened to you.
So this person was standing out there. He had come to offer something. He was from out of state. The secretary told this boss he had someone waiting. He also had someone in the office. He could’ve waited on the grantee and got him on his way quick. But he closed the door in the young man’s face and the young man stood there. That went on for about forty-five minutes. The secretary got tired of seein’ the man standin’ there, so she said, could she help him? Was it somethin’ he just wanted to give the man? He told her yes. She took it, so he wouldn’t stand there. That was all he
was gonna do, give it to him. I thought this was awfully rude. This boss does this quite often. I don’t know if he does it on purpose. I know if it’s an Indian or a black or a Latin he does this.
Life is a funny thing. We had this boss come in from Internal Revenue. He wanted to be very, very strict. He used to have meetings every Friday—about people comin’ in late, people leavin’ early, people abusin’ lunch time. Everyone was used to this relaxed attitude. You kind of went overtime. No one bothered you. The old boss went along. You did your work.
Every Friday, everyone would sit there and listen to this man. And we’d all go out and do the same thing again. Next Friday he’d have another meeting and he would tell us the same thing. (Laughs.) We’d all go out and do the same thing again. (Laughs.) He would try to talk to one and see what they’d say about the other. But we’d been working all together for quite a while. You know how the game is played. Tomorrow you might need a favor. So nobody would say anything. If he’d want to find out what time someone came in, who’s gonna tell ’em? He’d want to find out where someone was, we’d always say, “They’re at the Xerox.” Just anywhere. He couldn’t get through. Now, lo and behold! We can’t find him anywhere. He’s got into this nice, relaxed atmosphere. . . (Laughs.) He leaves early, he takes long lunch hours. We’ve converted him. (Laughs.)
After my grievances and my fighting, I’m a processing clerk. Never a typist no more or anything like that. (Laughs.) I started working here in 1969. There was an emergency and they all wanted to work overtime. So I made arrangements at home, ’cause I have to catch a later train. Our supervisor’s black. All of us are black. We’ll help her get it out so there won’t be any back drag on this. Okay, so we all worked overtime and made a good showing.
