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Here is an author’s excerpt from
his book, posted at an online news portal, a brief history of the past 30 years
of business and labor, if you will, in the US. The original article in the NYT,
Retraining Laid Off Workers, for What?
was posted by Sally Lerner FW 032706 but is now behind a subscription firewall.
Contact me if you want a copy either item. kwc Excerpt:
The Disposable American: Layoffs and their consequences
By Louis Uchitelle, Knopf, 2006, 304 pages Mental health professionals are just beginning to recognize that
layoffs chip away at human capital by eating at self-esteem on a mass scale. By Louis Uchitelle, AlterNet, Posted April 07, 2006 Several years ago,
Donald W. Davis stopped making visits back to New Britain, Conn. He felt shame
for what had happened to the Stanley Works, the city's largest employer, which
he had led from 1966 to 1988 -- from its best days to the beginning of the
layoffs and plant closings that, after he was gone, finally reduced Stanley's
presence in New Britain to a collection of mostly empty factory buildings and
reproachful former workers. Davis by then no
longer lived in New Britain. He had sold his Dutch Colonial home, which he had
painted a bright and optimistic yellow, and had moved with his wife to Martha's
Vineyard, where their summer house on seven acres of rolling lawn became their
main residence. It was an entirely different setting, but the trip back to New
Britain for visits was easy enough -- less than four hours by ferry and car --
and Davis at first made it often. Like many chief executives of his era, he had
been deeply involved in the life of the city that, in his day, had supplied
thousands of Stanley's workers. He had served on the board of education for
many years and was its president for a while. The six Davis children attended
the public elementary schools. But in the late 1990s,
the visits home stopped. Meeting former Stanley employees on the streets, in
restaurants, at the YMCA, where Davis still went to exercise, became too
painful. "They just moaned about what was happening to this great
company," Davis told me. He had tried to share their sadness, to
distinguish his stewardship from the accelerated pace of layoffs and the
disregard for New Britain that had become so striking after he was gone,"
as if he were a victim too. But he wasn't really. The people he encountered had
lost their jobs against their wishes, while he had retired on schedule, a
wealthy man. And he had, after all, initiated the layoffs. No one blamed him,
Davis maintained. But the encounters with former Stanley workers became, as
Davis put it, "much too personal." So he stayed away. When we renewed our
acquaintance a few years into his self-exile, I found a restless, often
passionate man, unable to put behind him his final years as chief executive. At
81, still stocky and agile, he was grateful for good health so late in life.
Age showed only in his hair, which was pure white, and in his eyes, which
became tired and bloodshot in the late afternoon, although when I suggested
that we take a break in our conversation, which had started in the morning and
had continued through lunch at a noisy seafood restaurant, he waved me off,
intent on his recollections. He no longer bothered with the suits and sports
jackets of his CEO days, but he did have on a white button-down shirt. He was
running a leadership seminar twice a week during the fall semester at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he shared a small, cluttered
office with two other instructors. Davis rarely canceled
a class; the seminar he led became a last connection to his former business
world, a final public platform. Sitting in on a class in the late afternoon,
listening to him draw on his experiences from his Stanley days, I imagined that
beyond the 19 young people seated in the room, he was speaking to all those he
knew back home, explaining that he had done as well as any executive could, in
a very changed world, to preserve Stanley as it was. And that could not be
done. The Stanley Works illustrates, as well as
any Fortune 1000 company, the accelerating deterioration of job security in
America over three generations of chief executives, a deterioration that Davis
and his counterparts in the first generation resisted for a while, reluctant to
let go of the expiring norms. So did their workers. For almost 90 years, from
the 1890s until the late 1970s, the thrust of American labor practices had been
toward lasting attachments of employers to workers and vice versa. There were lapses and backsliding in
those decades. Descriptions of labor practices during the 1921-22 recession,
for example, are remarkably similar to labor practices today. But the direction
was toward job security, not away from it. Efficiency seemed to require it. So
did union power, government policies, community expectations and social norms.
Even the Depression, with its mass unemployment, produced in reaction labor
laws that in the post-World War II years strengthened job security. We had
decided as a people -- managers, politicians and workers -- that job security
had value, and in pursuit of that value, we lifted ourselves out of insecurity.
And then, starting about 1977, midway through Davis' 21-year term as chief
executive, there was a U-turn. Over the next 20
years, the achieved job security disintegrated in the United States. Layoffs
were the medium. Each step in the disintegration was a novelty and a shock. But
the layoffs continued, and in 1984 the Bureau of Labor Statistics began to
count "worker displacement." By 2004, the bureau had counted at least 30 million full-time
workers who had been permanently separated from their jobs and their paychecks
against their wishes. Huge as that number was, it did not include the millions
more who had been forced into early retirement or had suffered some other form
of disguised layoff, masking the magnitude of the problem. A more comprehensive survey would very probably have found
that 7% or 8% of the nation's full-time workers had been laid off annually on
average - nearly double the recognized layoff rate. And the percentages crept
higher as the years passed. Davis remembers
vividly the circumstances that brought on the U-turn. The experience was, in
his word, "traumatic." He awoke in 1979 to find that customers for
Stanley's hand tools were defecting in alarming numbers. The lure was Asian
tools. Once-shoddy socket wrenches, screwdrivers, claw hammers, saws, levels,
chisels, pliers and measuring tapes imported from Asia had gradually become
indistinguishable in quality from Stanley's offerings at 60% of the price - a
feat Davis and his counterparts in many other industries had not anticipated. Scrambling to respond,
they cut prices and, hoping to preserve profits, they began to cut labor costs,
at first through attrition and then through layoffs. Hundreds of other
companies were caught in a similar experience. From then on, job security
unwound in America. Layoffs became the measure of our national retreat from the
dignity that had been gradually bestowed on American workers over the previous
90 years. What started as a necessary response to the intrusion of foreign
manufacturers into the American marketplace got out of hand. By the late 1990s,
getting rid of workers had become normal practice, ingrained behavior, just as
job security had been 25 years earlier. That did not happen
without resistance, particularly in the 1980s and early 1990s. Community
groups, for example, tried to purchase and reopen shut factories, the goal
being to reemploy the working people who gave the community its existence. The
Roman Catholic Church joined in this endeavor and issued two pastoral letters
in the 1980s opposing job destruction. But then the church fell silent, as did
the communities, which disintegrated without the steady jobs that had sustained
them. Government regulation had protected the jobs of nearly 13 percent of the
work force, those employed in airlines, trucking, public utilities, telephones,
banking and railroads. And then deregulation,
starting with President Jimmy Carter, precipitated endless reorganizations in
those industries, and endless layoffs to accommodate the reorganizations, until
reorganization and layoff finally became the norm. Organized labor also
protested, but union membership and power were already in decline, and after
1981, when President Ronald Reagan fired and then replaced the nation's
striking air traffic controllers, strike activity in support of job security --
or in support of any other demand, for that matter -- declined precipitously.
The old assumption that a worker out on strike had his job waiting once the
strike ended was gone. Just as layoffs began to be a source of
national anxiety, mainstream economic theory completed an about-face that in
effect endorsed layoffs and diminished the pressure on the nation's presidents
and on Congress to preserve job security. The dethroned way of thinking had recognized a central
role for government in protecting workers in a free market economy.
Entrepreneurial, hard-driving managers were essential to keep the economy
vibrant and growing. But they ran roughshod over workers unless they were
restrained by government rules and regulations, including rules that
strengthened labor's bargaining power. The marketplace would not provide job
security without pressure from government. That way of thinking, born in the
New Deal in the 1930s and greatly expanded over the next three decades, died in
the 1970s. The new intellectual
framework took the opposite view, and in so doing validated what was already
beginning to happen. Companies were freeing themselves from the many
obligations to their employees that had accumulated over the years, and now
mainstream economics blessed that endeavor. In the process, government was
depicted as an obstacle to prosperity. Unfettered enterprises, the argument now
went, would expand more rapidly and, over the long run, share their rising
profits with their workers, doing so voluntarily through job creation and
raises. If that did not happen
-- and it did not happen for tens of millions of people who lost their jobs --
well, that was the fault of the job losers themselves. They had failed to
acquire the necessary skills and education to qualify for the increasingly
sophisticated jobs that were available. They lacked value as workers. And the
argument took hold. Sanford M. Jacoby, the economic historian, citing a study
typical of this period, noted that "workers with at least some college
education were more likely than less educated workers to view fairness as
'recognition of individual abilities' instead of 'equal treatment for
all.'" The new economic theory, making each
worker responsible for his or her own job security, interacted fatally with the
actual layoff experience. Layoffs, we are told, do not happen to people who are
valued by their employers. The layoff says that you have failed in your
endeavors to improve your skills and to be flexible, innovative, congenial and
hardworking. The damage to self-esteem from this message is enduring. It shows up frequently in people who
have been laid off, whether or not they work again, and yet it is ignored in
the political debate. Job creation and full employment are held up by Democrats
and Republicans, and nearly all the experts who advise them on policy, as sufficient
antidote. Putting the laid-off back to work in new jobs solves the problem.
There is income again and even prosperity, or the potential for it. But mental
health is not easily restored. Psychologists and
psychiatrists are just beginning to recognize that layoffs chip away at human
capital by eating at self-esteem on a mass scale. It is like acid rain eroding the environment, according to Dr. Theodore J. Jacobs, a
professor of psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and New York
University School of Medicine in New York. He says: "Even if a person is
accurate in saying, 'I did a really good job, and I can see that the company is
in a bad way, and they have to lay off a lot of people and it is really not
about me,' there is seldom an escape from the inner sense of 'Why me?' In other
words, one has some sense that one has failed, and the outside world has made
that judgment. And that self-perception dovetails with existing inadequacies
that many people feel about themselves." The Great Depression was less damaging. Millions of people lost their
jobs then, but the majority blamed flaws in the market system, not in
themselves. They demanded that government fix the flaws. That collective
response, which helped to produce the New Deal, is missing today. Implicit in
self-blame is acquiescence to layoffs, now the American condition. To read the full excerpt http://www.alternet.org/workplace/34015/ |
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