How Secure Is Your Job?

By Laura Barcella, AlterNet. Posted April 7, 2006.

In his new book, "The Disposable American," New York Times business writer Louis Uchitelle takes a sobering look at the sordid history -- and the future -- of layoffs in America.

Though the bulk of his expertise lays in the business realm, Uchitelle argues that layoffs' ascending frequency isn't just damaging America's job security, but our sense of self-worth. He writes that the ever-insidious "self-help" movement (specifically, books such as "Who Moved My Cheese?") has encouraged workers to accept more responsibility for their own job security than necessary -- unfairly placing the whole burden of fair wages, pensions and workplace stability on employees' shoulders rather than the corporate heads hiring (and firing) them in the first place.

Unsurprisingly, almost every person he interviews in "The Disposable American" seems to prove Uchitelle right. The human stories shared in the book echo Uchitelle's hypothesis that getting laid off has long-term negative effects on motivation and self-esteem, as well as making it harder to land a more challenging position the next time around.

Fortunately, though, Uchitelle isn't just the bearer of bad news. He also offers ideas for strategic solutions -- potential ways to reverse, or at least downshift, what he dubs the "U-turn" in job security that began in the late 1970s in response to rising foreign competition.

He spoke with AlterNet via telephone from his New York office.

Laura Barcella: First, tell me why you decided to write this book.

Louis Uchitelle: I have been covering the rise of job insecurity since the late '80s, and I became interested in what was happening to people. There was always this idea that we would get rid of the blue-collar workers [who] weren't pulling their weight, and it kept going, on and on, into the white-collar workers.

At the New York Times, I was the lead writer on a long, six-part series in 1996 that laid out what was happening -- and by then we had gone through so many barriers of resistance to layoffs, or of limiting them, and the Clinton administration at that point came in and said -- we'll keep the layoffs and handle it by job creation and by reconditioning workers -- education and training. And we'll cycle them back into the work force. The more I wrote about that, the more I realized that something was very wrong, and I finally put it together in a book proposal.

LB: What sorts of reactions have you received thus far?

LU: People think it's an important book Two issues that I think are very important is this myth that people can, through more education and training, cycle back into the work force with perfectly good jobs. The evidence is definitely against that. First of all, there is an oversupply of skilled people relative to the jobs that are available. And secondly, we don't properly measure the damage to the companies themselves and the productivity that comes from job security.

To people who are, in effect, told that this is a be-your-own-manager society, when they're laid off, [it's implied] that they don't have value as workers -- and that's a considerable psychological blow and a source of mental illness. I didn't realize that until I started to report this book, and ran into it over and over again among the people I was interviewing. I went to psychiatrists, and they said that there was no question about [layoffs' damaging psychological effect] on people -- some people more than others -- depending on their personality and predispositions.

But it means that people don't get back into the work force using all their old skills. They don't take risks, and they suffer. It's a memory that undermines them for many years -- and this is not a story about unemployment, it's story about layoffs. Most people go back to work again or drop out altogether.

LB: What were some of the long-term psychological effects of layoffs?

LU: I found people constantly trying to figure out what happened to them, trying to figure out if they had just done this, or had a different boss, or changed departments They kept going over and over it again; why did this happen to them? They sought, in these conversations, some peace of mind. They tried to regain their self-esteem.

There's a sociologist named Richard Sennett who, in his book "The Corrosion of Character," makes the point that we all have a life narrative, and work is part of that narrative, and the narrative is part of our identity. If you take away the work and the identity that comes with the work, you interrupt the life narrative.

I found people trying to reconstruct that narrative in various efforts, and I think you would see that in somebody like Kim Dewey, one of the mechanics [quoted in my book]. There's others, like Craigy Imperio, who got his engineering degree and who, through hard work, has managed slowly to work his way up the ladder. But others don't do it.

Laura Barcella is an associate editor at AlterNet.