Memoir of a Miracle Worker,1975
By Tom Smucker
On February 27, 1975, the ten-story phone company building on East 13th Street in Manhattan caught on fire and knocked out phone service for most of the East Village and the Lower East Side, destroying most of the switching equipment and connecting frames inside. I worked there alongside almost everyone, it seemed, employed by New York Telephone. Service was restored on March 21, in what was dubbed The Miracle on Second Avenue. I wrote the essay below for the Village Voice in April, 1975.
The atmosphere of disaster at East 13th Street, along with the incredible maleness of the place, and the Phone Company’s usual Armed Forces style of organization, reminded a lot of guys of their stint in the service. But being a Vietnam era draft dodger myself, the closest thing I could compare it to was, oddly enough, the Woodstock festival. Both confronted me with more people and energy than I could actually absorb. And both overwhelmed the media.
In the case of Woodstock, the whole thing eventually got its focus from the movie, with its front-row-center view of the performers and various good vibes shots of the crowds. I didn’t think the movie was a lie, but if it had been a record of what I experienced it would have shown the performers as tiny dots of far-away light, and had long boring waits between acts with long walks from sleeping bags, to concerts, to johns.
In the case of 13th Street, the media seemed to solve its problem by focusing in on the figure of Lee Oberst, New York Telephone vice-president and man-in-charge at 13th Street. I’m just a humble worker, folks, and didn’t have access to the corridors of power or see what great miracles were wrought there. But the media image of Lee Oberst, grappling with the New York City switching systems the way he used to tinker with old radios in the South Bronx, had no correlation to what I experienced.
From what I could see, the actual plan of attack consisted of having access to any equipment anywhere in the nationwide Bell System. And pouring an endless shitload of people with endless overtime into the building until the job was done.
Where there had once been maybe 20 people on a floor there were now hundreds, if not a thousand. There were guys in the stairways, in the halls climbing above you, working around you, in the fire exits, and mobbed around the elevators. The famous third floor distributing frame that was flown in from Chicago was so crowded it like the galley of a slave ship in a Victor Mature movie.
Where did they all come from? The answer lies in the Phone Company’s hiring patterns for the last few years and in the structure of their personnel hierarchy, particularly in the relationship between lower management and craft.
Five years ago, when the phone service in New York City got so terrible, the company was “forced” hire waves of new workers, including me. (I say “forced” because a lot of old-timers were convinced the company let things slide for reasons of their own.) So that now they have an even more automated and efficient system. One that needs fewer workers to maintain. Except when it burns up in an unprecedented fire.
Working for the Bell System, like working for the city, used to be considered a secure job. But times change, and like the city, it has started laying off. Telephone Company crafts, traditionally the most secure part of the work force, have seen layoffs as nearby as New England and New Jersey. Part-timing of operators here has been announced. And Western Electric in New York City laid off almost every installer with less than seven years seniority. These are the guys who install the new frames and switching equipment in the central offices and so are most expendable when expansion and improvements are halted.
They are also of course, the most needed when old equipment burns up and has to be replaced. But at 13th Street they were able to get by using the Western Electric installers they still had (way over 1000 per shift) without recalling any of the guys they’d let go. They simply dropped all Western work everywhere else, something that would have been impossible three years ago. And put everyone on endless overtime.
Other ongoing maintenance and installation work, however, could not just be dropped. In fact, extra work was generated throughout the city by the fire, since many calls in other neighborhoods were normally routed through the 13th Street building. So while the work load was increasing in other locations, the work force shrunk as men were sent to 13th Street. This meant that while you were at 13th Street, someone back where you came from had to do your job. Also on overtime. Or better yet, in the company’s eyes. Not on overtime, thus revealing that a job once done by four men could now be done by three. Which made you wonder if the whole thing wasn’t turning into a test run for a layoff. Since it’s always cheaper to dump half your staff and keep the rest on overtime than keep all of them on full salary and benefits.
Three and a half years ago, just before the famous seven-month strike in New York State, the company promoted a lot of guys to foreman. This is what’s called first line management—the bottom level of the management hierarchy. Almost all of whom were craftsmen for many years before they were promoted.
These guys, of course, usually know the jobs of the guys they supervise, since they once did them themselves. So that when there’s a strike, the phone company always has a ready-made set of crack strikebreakers, so to speak, who can step in and take over the jobs of the striking craft workers. Actually, they are often the most experienced workers, taking the promotion more for the money and prestige than because on any interest in managing itself. And so tend to “relish” getting their hands back on some tools during a strike, Which explains why your phone service was probably less affected by that strike than this fire.
Oberst, down through his chain of command, had this glut of first-liners to use wherever needed. At one point, for example, I was fastening a wire with three foremen and their boss watching me, which hardly fits the no bullshit, rolled-up-sleeves management image presented in the press. And these scenes weren’t uncommon. More than once I saw a guy pushing a broom, followed by his foreman, who had nothing else to do. Or like myself and lot of other people, you could do a job once for one foreman and all over again for someone else.
Besides being available, this bulge of management was particularly vulnerable and could be worked even harder than the crafts. The new three year contracts were signed this summer and there is really no chance of a strike coming up. There is also a recession-inspired drive for a cutback in the payroll.
When Western Electric laid its guys off, it busted a lot of supervisors back down to craft. But they could just as easily be laid off, fired or given humiliating assignments, with no recourse from contracts and union protection.
I talked to one foreman, for example, who said he was put on 16-hour days with no days off and no end in sight. And no way to stop it. He was one of the fairest foreman I ever heard of, and I’ve often wondered if there was any correlation. (Management, by the way, isn’t necessarily paid for any extra hours worked.)
But worse than this, many of these foremen were used to get work done that belonged to craft. Union busting without benefit of a strike.
At first I enjoyed the fact that management weren’t wearing their usually required ties or jackets. It was fun to see which people in management actually owned old Levis and which ones felt compelled to go out and buy a pair. Or who showed up in a blue windbreaker or work shoes when Oberst was reported seen in them. But the management chic of old clothes made it impossible to tell who was management when there were so many people you didn’t know. The guy you thought was just another craftsman might actually be a a terrified foreman forced into doing your job by his boss.
Of course there were places that were logically organized where guys had interesting jobs with a clear purpose. And even the fuck-ups could work out to your advantage. But in general it was hard to relate to the we’re here to restore service spirit.
It was easier to groove on getting a break in the old routine, or being in on the Big Job that’s In The News or at least being a part of something larger that really needed to get done. While concentrating mainly on that overtime bonanza in the middle of the recession. As a popular graffiti put in “God Bless the Torch.”
At first everyone was cracking jokes about the fortunes they would make, Like a bunch of friendly millionaires. But Uncle Sam ended up taking half of it anyway. And as the days wore on everyone looked less like millionaires and more like woozy stumblebums. A friend of mine, after being switched around between day and night shifts, went out in the Village one morning to move his car. He was weaving down the sidewalk so badly after parking it that the cops picked him up. They thought he was a junkie until he showed them his phone company I.D. and told them he was working at 13th Street. Then they drove him home. The next day he couldn’t remember where he’d parked it.
Along with fatigue we began wondering about all the shit in the air we were inhaling, including the famous polyvinyl chloride, producer of liver cancer. The stuff that made it so rough on the fireman who fought the blaze. And the stuff, I presume that made the clothes I wore to work smell weird when I got home.
The company provided respirators that looked like gas masks. But since most people had to talk to do their work, and you couldn’t understand a guy with one on, nobody wore them. A month later my throat still gets drier and I cough up more phlegm than I used to.
After awhile that break in the Old Routine became its own New Routine. Particularly as management got their bearings and eased back into the typical patterms of petty harassment. Even the free donuts, coffee, and sandwiches, as it turned out, were making almost everyone nauseated and constipated.
It was a weird and interesting scene, but not indefinitely. And way too screwed up to be The Great Adventure of the official version.
As one guy wrote on his hardhat, “Miracle, my ass.”
The company made him remove it.
Because of the profanity, they said.
This article was accepted, edited, proof-read, and prepared to be printed at the Village Voice and then got misplaced as the senior editors got switched. By the time the new guy, Tom Morgan, looked it over, he liked it but it was no longer news. Posted above as edited at the Voice back then.
