Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (68 page)

Brokers merely are ribbon clerks. They’re order takers. They do very little if it’s a big house. It’s a profession that’s in its decline. Everything is being committed to computer, to systemized tapes. These are houses now on the Street that say, “Don’t you ever make a decision. We have a computer that tells you what to do to your customer, to buy and to sell.” At some point the function of a broker may be relegated to some girl who sits at a phone and repeats what the computer has told the customer to buy and to sell. I see Wall Street being reduced to kind of a supermarket. The biggest houses will be swallowing the others. You’ll wind up with four or five houses and not many more than half a dozen.

There are houses that guarantee if you utilize the machine, you’ll get five or ten trades a year out of your customers. They’ll put him in a stock and they’ll take him out. Beautiful. But in actual practice, when the market goes sour, the machine breaks down. It can’t take care of the vagaries. The machine can’t account for an economic crisis or a world depression. The machine can’t account for an unemployment rate that exceeds six percent. The machine can’t account for a military adventure in Vietnam. It’s a robot. It can do what the programmed tape tells it to. But it can’t account for the extraordinary world we live in.

People like me start out with a feeling that there’s a place for them in society, that they really have a useful function. They see it destroyed by the cynicism of the market. A piece of worthless stock can be given glamour and many people may be induced to buy it. Excitement, public relations. The people can be wiped out with the absolute cynicism that brings those who conceived it to the top.

Can you imagine? I really felt I could buck this machine. When I began, I was sure I could win. I no longer have that confidence. What’s happening is so extraordinary. It’s so much bigger than I am.

I’m just trying to go along for the ride. I have little to do with it. They believe the game because they know how the cards are gonna be dealt. I don’t believe the game because I know the cards are stacked. After being told about fiscal responsibility, they know the treasury’s gonna spew out all kinds of dollars, and all kinds of money’s gonna be made available to the corporations for them to put in the market. This is a contradiction. This is where the thing breaks down.

I can’t say what I’m doing has any value. This doesn’t make me too happy. If I could learn in some way to live with the wheel—but I can’t. If I make an error and it costs the customer money, it’s as though it were my money. This is extraordinary. The average broker lives to generate commissions and he goes home as though he were selling shoelaces or ties. He doesn’t carry the goddamn market with him. I carry it like it was a monkey on my back. Man, I wake up in the middle of the night remembering what I did right or wrong. Thats’ no good. But I really can’t make it happen.

When I built the houses, I hired a bricklayer, I hired the roofer, I determined who put the goddamned thing together. And when I handed somebody a key, the house was whole. I made it happen. I can’t do it in the market. I’m just being manipulated and moved around and I keep pretending I can understand it, that I can somehow cope with it. The truth is I can’t.

The broker as a human being is being demeaned by the financial community. His commissions are being cut. I joined the Association of Investment Brokers—we number about a thousand members as against forty thousand brokers—which tries to think of itself as though it were the Pilots Union. The terrible thing is we don’t fly planes. We handle the fuckin’ phone and punch out digits on something that translates from a computer. We pretend we have status in the community, but we’re expendable.

The brokerage firms just cut our commission again, while they increased their own rate by forty-two percent. The SEC approved a new set of commission rates. The SEC is just an arm of the stock exchange. They put their people in it. Like every regulatory agency, it serves the exchange and pisses on the public. The commissions for the houses are larger, but I make no more than I made before. This happened in every firm on the Street. It’s as though they went out and played golf together and agreed on it.

In this rip-off, we’re treated with contempt by the members of the stock exchange. You’re being told you’re not a useful member of society. They’re really saying, “If you make too big a noise, we’re gonna have a girl take the orders and the machine’ll do the rest. You’re better off to let us make your decisions. Don’t attempt to use your intelligence. Don’t attempt to figure out what’s happening, if you know what’s good for you.”

Oh, I’ll continue to cope. (Laughs.) I’ll continue to struggle against the machine. I’ll continue with my personal disillusionment. (Laughs.) Oh, I’d like one morning to wake up and go to some work that gave me joy. If I could build houses all over again, I would do it. Because when it’s finished, somebody’s gonna live in it, and the house is gonna be built and it’s gonna be there after I’m gone. (Pause.) Ahhh, fuck it!

 

When I was with VISTA my greatest frustration was dealing with administrators. I was working in a school and I saw the board of education as a big bureaucracy, which could not move. I was disdainful of bureaucrats in Washington, who set down rules without ever having been to places where those rules take effect. Red tape. I said I could replace a bureaucrat and conduct a program in relationship to people, not figures. I doubt seriously if three years from now I’ll be involved in public administration. One reason is each day I find myself more and more like unto the people I wanted to replace.

I’ll run into one administrator and try to institute a change and then I’ll go to someone else and connive to get the change. Gradually your effectiveness wears down. Pretty soon you no longer identify as the bright guy with the ideas. You become the fly in the ointment. You’re criticized by your superiors and your subordinates. Not in a direct manner. Indirectly, by being ignored. They say I’m unrealistic. One of the fellas that works with me said, “It’s a dream to believe this program will take sixteen-, seventeen-year-old dropouts and make something of their lives.” This may well be true, but if I’m going to belive that I can’t believe my job has any worth.

I may be rocking the boat, though I’m not accomplishing anything. As the criticism of me steps up, the security aspect of my job comes into play. I begin to say, “Okay, I got a recent promotion. I earned it.” They couldn’t deny anybody who made significant inputs. Now I’m at a plateau. As criticism continues, I find myself tempering my remarks, becoming more and more concerned about security.

I’m regarded as an upstart. I’m white and younger than they are. (Laughs.) They’re between thirty and forty. They might rate me fair to middlin’ as a person. They might give me a sixty percent range on a scale of a hundred percent. As a supervisor, I’d be down to about twenty percent. (Laughs.) I think I’m a better supervisor than they give me credit for. They criticize me for what criticism they may have of the entire program—which is about the way I criticized my supervisor when I was in their position. He became an ogre, the source of blame for the failings of the program. The difference is I don’t patronize my staff the way he did. They make a recommendation to me and I try to carry it out, if I feel it’s sound. I think it’s built up some of their confidence in me.

My suggestions go through administrative channels. Ninety percent of it is filtered out by my immediate superior. I have been less than successful in terms of getting things I believe need to be done. It took me six months to convince my boss to make one obvious administrative change. It took her two days to deny that she had ever opposed the change.

We’ve got five or six young people who are burning to get into an automotive training program. Everybody says, “It takes signatures, it takes time.” I follow up on these things because everybody else seems to forget there are people waiting. So I’ll get that phone call, do some digging, find out nothing’s happened, report that to my boss, and call back and make my apologies. And then deal with a couple of minor matters—Johnny ripped off a saw today . . . certain enrollees are protesting because they’re getting gypped on their paychecks.

So we’re about a quarter to five and I suddenly look at my desk and it’s filled with papers—reports and memos. I have to sort them out before a secretary can file ‘em. Everybody’ll leave at five o’clock, except for me. Usually I’m there until six ’. If I did all the paper work I should, my sanity would go. Paper work I almost totally ignore. I make a lot of decisions over the phone. It hits you about two months later when somebody says, “Where’s the report on such and such? Where’s the documentation?”

 

“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.
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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.

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.