Off the Shelf: After the Downsizing, a Downward Spiral
By Steven Greenhouse
For the generation of Americans who entered the work force after World War II, giant corporations like AT&T were the place to be, much like Microsoft has been the place to be in the last decade. In the quarter-century after the war, Ma Bell, General Motors and other staid blue chips represented the pinnacle of what capitalism had to offer workers because of the extraordinary job security and the cornucopia of benefits that these companies provided.
College graduates tripped over one another in the hope of securing lifetime careers with these corporate Rocks of Gibraltar. The security they offered meant a comfortable house, a generously financed retirement package and, more often than not, a 9-to-5 job that allowed that era's organization man to balance work and family.
It was a time when job security was a bedrock corporate principle. In 1962, Earl S. Willis, the manager of employee benefits at General Electric, wrote, "Maximizing employment security is a prime company goal." Later, he wrote, "The employee who can plan his economic future with reasonable certainty is an employer's most productive asset."
"White-Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and Its Rewards in Corporate America," (W. W. Norton, $26.95) gives a blow-by-blow account of how that era of beneficent employers and lifetime job security ended unceremoniously. With painful detail and depressing anecdote, the author, Jill Andresky Fraser, traces how corporate America's philosophy toward its white- collar workers has grown harsher and how the theories of G.E.'s Mr. Willis have given way to those of G.E.'s much-lionized John F. Welch Jr., who was once known as Neutron Jack for shedding 100,000 jobs at the company.
Put another way, Ms. Fraser's book describes the downside of downsizings and the underside of the 1990's economic boom.
At many companies, job security has gone the way of the mastodon. Swept up in what appears to be the latest managerial fad, the author says, many chief executives lay off thousands of workers, hoping that such moves will delight securities analysts and investors and nudge their stocks up 5 percent. Corporate managers, she writes, slash away at employee benefits as if the executives who ran the companies before them were wastrels who lavished too much on employees. Many companies have systematically increased health insurance premiums for their workers, reduced the range of health benefits and phased out defined- benefit retirement plans in favor of far less expensive 401(k)'s.
Ms. Fraser, the finance editor of Inc. magazine and a general editor of Bloomberg Personal Finance, has written an unrelentingly downbeat book that sees the economy's glass as three-quarters empty. She glosses over the record economic expansion, the stock market boom and the benefits that these developments have bestowed on millions of Americans. Instead, she focuses on what has happened to white- collar workers, and the picture she paints is grim. They are working harder, with less job security, less satisfaction and often less reward.
Ms. Fraser sheds fresh and penetrating light on an important area that is often overlooked: the tribulations of white-collar workers. Much has been written about downsizing, but she broadens the literature in examining pervasive insecurity on the job, shrinking benefit packages, the rise of the temporary worker and the pitting of worker against worker in the downsizing game of musical chairs.
[Full text: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/08/business/08SHEL.html]
Carl
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