SOCIETY - About work, loyalty and lay-offs

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Americans carrying work ethic to extremes

By David D. Perlmutter Originally published August 17, 2001

BATON ROUGE, La. - As a teacher, I'm used to having at least three or four students come into my office after each exam or paper assignment, hoping, praying, cajoling, begging to get a higher grade. The argument that I have found the toughest to deflect is: "But I worked so much and got so little!"

Hard work is, we like to think, as made-in-the-U.S.A. as baseball, apple pie and bad summer movies. Some of the great characters of Americana - the pilgrim, the Midwestern pioneer-farmer, the struggling inventor, the bootstraps immigrant - are hard-working folks whose nose-to-the-grindstone perseverance pays off by the final page of the story or the last act of the film.

Even the most recent worker stereotypes in Internet and computer programming are of obsessed people who live, breathe and abuse their carpal tunnels 24/7 on the job.

But it is clear that many are growing more disenchanted with, and less willing to believe in, the super-worker ethic. Much of the real increase in wages for American workers in the 1990s did not come from stock-market options or fat bonuses, but the rising prevalence of the two-working-parent family and more time at the office put in by individual workers.

The rebellion against hard work is evident from cubicle to slogging cubicle. In recent years there has been a flood of litigation and complaints about unpaid overtime, from apparel workers to supermarket clerks, oil riggers and poultry processors to Justice Department lawyers.

Still, standard practice in many businesses is the coercing of employees to stay extra hours off the clock "for the good of the company." As the Wall Street Journal reported recently, another tactic is to shove training time off the books into what used to be called our "personal time."

Then there is the epidemic of layoffs, about 700,000 announced since January. Companies like Dell, Compaq and even General Electric have fired tens of thousands of workers, not necessarily based on job performance. Meanwhile, whereas America's CEOs' real salaries rose 500 percent in the 1990s, those of most workers barely topped inflation.

Many fired workers have learned the moral lesson of the new economy: The company expects you to be loyal to it, but doesn't feel any loyalty to you. One Austin, Texas, techster I know put it this way, "When you see good people laid off, people who've lived and breathed for the company, it teaches you a lesson: We are all just temp workers. Nobody should be a 'company woman' or 'company man' any more."

The human cost of our overtime culture is felt in ever-increasing ripples. Years ago we chided the Japanese for their workplace zeal, which sometimes resulted in the karoshi (death from too much work).

But starting in 1997, Americans spent more time on the job each year than workers anywhere else in the industrialized world, two 40-hours weeks longer than the Japanese.

Our frazzled new world is detailed in a revealing book, White Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and Its Rewards in Corporate America, by Jill Andresky Fraser. As her title suggests, the office has become a cubicle version of the piece-work sweatshop of Dickensian nightmare. Hard work is repaid in uncertainty, fear and abridged family time; the state of our children is a direct reflection of the state of the workplace.

We can also attribute this state of affairs partly to our much higher expectations and standards for lifestyles than those of our parents and grandparents.

No white-collar worker thinks in terms only of "putting food on the table" like his Depression-era grandmother, or "getting the kids a new bike at Christmas" like his 1950s father.

We want it all now: An SUV for every family member, houses that are almost double the dimensions of post-war homes, super-sized refrigerators, barbecue grills and air conditioners, innumerable entertainment gadgets, annual exotic vacations. We have created giant gerbil wheels of overspending, over-debt and overwork.

Let's find a way to make work humanly (and humanely) rewarding in the new century before "hard work" shatters us and our families.

David D. Perlmutter is a senior fellow and associate professor at Louisiana State University's Reilly Center for Media & Public Affairs.

-- Anonymous, August 17, 2001


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