Excerpt: The Disposable American

Excerpted from "The Disposable American" by Louis Uchitelle.

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.