Is the fun over for workers?

[Lawrence]

Here's an excerpt from this weeks online Fortune magazine. The title is "Is
The Fun Over?" It's about how worker perks are being retracted now that the
recession has hit. What jumped out at me is the bit about worker
friendliness being blamed for the failure of the dot-coms. I have seen such
blame handed out first hand, at parties that I've been to. I have met some
older men, businessmen, who hated the whole dot com thing because it made
kids richer than themselves, and these men, these older men, are absolutely
gleeful to see it come to an end, to see the kids put back in their places,
to see everything go back to normal. (In April Michael Dell gave an
interview to Business Week. In that interview he says, "I think we're back
to a normal business environment, and by normal I mean people are grateful
to have jobs, they are ready to work.")

Perhaps the most disturbing thing I've seen, regarding this trend, is that
some of it has come from liberals. Gary Troudeau did a Doonesbury cartoon a
few months ago in which Mike's daughter looks at the office equipment being
sold by a dying dot.com, stuff like pinball machines, pool tables, and
pianos. Mike then smirks and says something like, "Now we know why they went
out of business." There are in fact very good reasons for having games in a
setting where you want young programmers to stay and work for 12 hours a
day. But I wonder if, on this score, older liberals are in the same boat as
older conservatives, both are jealous to see those kids get so rich so
young, both are happy to see it stop?

Here's an excerpt:
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A former dot-commer now at a multinational telecom, Jon (he'd rather we not
use his last name) pines for the days of yore. "The bright, translucent
plastics, the kooky flashing lights, the scooters--it's all gone," he sighs.
An information architect, Jon says his managers "would keel over at the
thought of color" and doubts that traditional firms will take any further
steps toward emulating the footloose environments of the dot-com phenomenon.
"Who cares about job happiness? That's not a measurable benefit," he
grumbles. "The closest I get to job satisfaction is a 30-minute nap in my
car after lunch."

Jon may just be a disgruntled dot-communist, but his bitterness echoes
throughout the American workplace. Three out of four Americans are
dissatisfied with or fundamentally disconnected from their jobs, according
to a recent Gallup Management Journal survey. Granted, workers have been
miserable for centuries--but now that the dot-com boom, which spawned a host
of worker-friendly initiatives, has ended, is the joy gone for good?

The slowdown, of course, has been quite a killjoy. "We're seeing a snap back
now," says Orton Varona, team leader of corporate employment and technical
recruiting at Southwest Airlines. "Organizations are reeling in some of the
perks that they were so liberal with in the past." When companies snap back,
workers feel the sting. A survey by the Society for Human Resource
Management found that only 27% of companies offered a subsidized cafeteria,
compared with 37% in 1999. Company-sponsored sports teams and concierge
services are also on the decline.

What's worse, a worker-friendly culture stands accused of precipitating the
failure of many dot-coms. "The stuffier side of establishment America is now
backlashing and making fun of what was occurring in these dot-com
environments," says Nigel Morris, president and COO of credit card giant
Capital One (which itself is still committed to fun, see box at right). The
dot-com culture as well as the business model is under indictment.