Word: beasleyisms
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...computer is Datapoint 5500, a "minicomputer" Harvard bought last year, and Brown-Beasley, assistant to the Office of Fiscal Services, is the computer's wet-nurse. There are ten terminals on this end of the third floor of Holyoke Center, he says, and they are so versatile that if you really wanted to, you could wire them up "every ten miles down the trans-Canadian pipeline." Brown-Beasley seems to like this phrase; he says it again before lifting the memory "drive," which looks like a stack of records inside a plastic cylinder, out of the machine and switching...
...machine works as it should--and this is an important if to Brown-Beasley--then the quiet transformations it will make on work here on the third floor are good ones, he says. His is a futuristic and optimistic managerial attitude that when the machine works, the worker is transformed. "It makes the woman better than she is," he says. "Work becomes more human, not less." The great majority of the clerical workers on the third floor are women, and Brown-Beasley takes a biological view of the effect of the machine: "It means that a lady who's been...
...mistake, however, to parallel the difference between Brown-Beasley and the young workers Peixoto and Reddy to the relationship of management to the 75 or so clerical workers on the third floor of Holyoke Center. As Brown-Beasley says, "lines are not so clearly drawn." The employees do not all view themselves as a distinct and subordinate class, toiling in tedium for an employer whose interests are not their own. The unpopularity of that view is demonstrated by the difficulty District 65, a clerical and technical workers' union, has had organizing in Cambridge. For the people who work...
...graduate of the College and works in student loans says the "team spirit" in his section is a paternalistic creation, and that it will frustrate the District 65 effort. Because the work is "less regimented than other white-collar work," he says, a team spirit flourishes. Or as Brown-Beasley says, "there's an extraordinary amount of intimacy here. One can hear the name Jerry [Jerrold Gibson] on the lips of many people here...
...Brown-Beasley dismisses the word paternalistic. When he gives white roses to an employee who is "in the dumps," when he kisses "half a dozen women at Christmas," Brown-Beasley insists, he is acting from genuine concern. But he recognizes that there is a difference between management and labor. "The women on whose backs this system has been erected--who carry home five and six hundred a month--are aware that there is a difference, and it would be a lie to say that they don't resent that difference...