File:Bell telephone magazine (1922) (14733306286).jpg

Identifier: belltelephone7273mag00amerrich (find matches)
Title: Bell telephone magazine
Year: 1922 (1920s)
Authors: American Telephone and Telegraph Company American Telephone and Telegraph Company. Information Dept
Subjects: Telephone
Publisher: (New York, American Telephone and Telegraph Co., etc.)
Contributing Library: Prelinger Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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I first came into this job,results were fairly good. But thenin the early 60s we began havingservice trouble. One summer, I re-member, we had our most difficulttime, and then we decided wecouldnt accept the old excuses anymore. The problem wasnt going togo away. We simply had to managethe job, and we had to recognizethat there was no room for preju-dice ... at all. At that time, C&P, like other com-panies, was entering a new periodwith a new employment market andnew sources of manpower. We hadsigned a piece of paper saying wewere an Equal Opportunity Em-ployer. We intended to implementthe spirit of that as well as theletter. Fulfilling that charge meantlearning to see and understand theviewpoint of new people cominginto the business—the black people,the disadvantaged, sometimes thedisenchanted—and learning to beflexible enough to cope with differ-ent backgrounds and disciplines.Many young black high school grad-uates have never had to achieve.When they go to work for the tele-
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The Operators phone company, it is often the firsttime they have ever been asked tomeet high standards of any sort.Many come from an environmentwhere they have never heard apolite word spoken. The idea of sim-ple courtesy, especially to a facelessvoice on the phone, may be as for-eign as Sanskrit. The labor market Washingtondraws upon encompasses an areathat reaches far outside Washing-ton itself. About 50 per cent of theoperators hired there are not nativeto the area. They come mostly fromthe deep South. Three out of fouroperators are black. Rothgeb com-ments: I think an all-black forcewould be as regrettable as an all-white force, but what we have sim-ply is a sample of the balance ofthe population in the local labormarket. The District of Columbia trafficoffices rank high in Bell System re-sults in terms of measured trafficitems such as board load, toll andassistance index, and directory as-sistance index. Washington trafficalso has maintained one of the low-er resignation and dism

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