'After the Downsizing, a Downward Spiral'

[Carl Remick]

[From today's NY Times.  NB, the reviewer's criticism, "She {the author} 
glosses over the record economic expansion, the stock market boom and the 
benefits that these developments have bestowed on millions of Americans" – 
all of which are proving evanescent.]

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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