White-Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and Its Rewards in Corporate America, Jill Andresky Fraser. W.W. Norton and Company, 278 pages, $26.95.
While working through the 1980s and 1990s as a financial journalist, JillAndresky Fraser was bothered by an apparent paradox: She observed the "buoyantoptimism" of corporate executives and business boosters enjoying a rising stockmarket at the same time that she was hearing "bleak workplace stories" fromwhite-collar employees. The good feelings on the part of CEOs were easy tounderstand. They were receiving million-dollar salaries, often with bonuses andlucrative stock options. But to Fraser's ears, there was also a disturbing rumbleof discontent in corporate America. It came from a wide range of professionalswho felt overworked and underrewarded, their health and happiness disintegratingunder the weight of job-related stress.
White-Collar Sweatshop, four years in the making, is packed with the tales of the working wounded. She has collected their stories by offering them a cloak of anonymity. "Margot," a marketing manager with a large retail company, is representative of the dozens of workers quoted: "Everybody's got their cell phones and their beepers and their laptop computers, because we've all got to be accessible all the time, even when we're on vacation. Every time there's a layoff, we all have to take on even more responsibilities. And we suspect that more layoffs are coming, which means our jobs are just going to keep getting worse." Margot took a deep breath, Fraser reports, and continued: "But the reward structure doesn't begin to keep up. Our benefits have been getting worse for years now. And the company's attitude is, This is the way of the world. If you don't like it, go someplace else."
Is the word "sweatshop" justified when used in this context? Fraser poses thatquestion herself in the book's introduction, acknowledging that she is writingabout a class of educated, comfortable, and even affluent workers. She leaves thequery hanging, to be addressed by the testimonies that follow, and for the restof the book uses the term with quotation marks around it. The weight of herevidence is intended to make the case that a great many of the estimated 80million white-collar workers--those in professional, administrative, technical,and sales jobs--are working longer hours under worse conditions.
Something has changed dramatically in the last two decades, Fraser contends,at least in comparison to the era immediately after World War II, when Americancorporations offered secure jobs and reliable benefits. "This shift," she writes,"is equivalent to an industrial revolution for white-collar workers who, bynecessity, have learned to adjust to (and often successfully function within)whatever versions of the white-collar 'sweatshop' have evolved within their owncompanies and industries."
While admitting that the postwar years can sometimes be seen through anostalgic haze, Fraser holds that period up as the best of times for white-collarworkers. In the 1950s, Thomas Spates, vice president of General Foods, thoughtthe way to prevent socialism in America was for employers to treat workers withdignity and respect. Earl Willis, the manager of employee benefits at GeneralElectric, wrote in 1962: "Guarantees of employment cannot be made by businesseswhose markets are as unpredictable as General Electric's. Nevertheless, werecognize the desire of employees for job continuity, and we have long striven toprovide the greatest measure practicable." IBM's employee handbook boasted asrecently as 20 years ago that "in nearly 40 years, no person employed on aregular basis by IBM has lost as much as one hour of working time because of alayoff."
The economics of the 1980s changed all that in a hurry. Fraser quotes anengineer working for the computer-chip maker Intel saying that a manager "cameright out and told us that Intel is not going to be a place where you can workuntil retirement."
The lack of job security looms large in the psyches of the workers Fraserinterviews. Merger-related layoffs and cutbacks cost about 250,000 men and womentheir jobs, she contends, just in the period from 1995 through early 1999. Andmuch of the churning in the corporate world has not been good for business, sheargues. Only a third of corporations profit from mergers and acquisitions, whilethe rest of the deals destroy value. In 1994 Quaker Oats bought Snapple for $1.7billion, and sold it three years later for $300 million. Also in 1994, Novellpurchased WordPerfect for $1.4 billion, and then unloaded it for $200 million twoyears later. From the 1980s to the mid-1990s, the cost of failed corporatemergers topped $100 billion.
Occasionally companies have been ruined by cuts that went too deep. In themid-1990s, "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap cut one-third of Scott Paper's workforce--anddrove its stock price up 225 percent. Later, he got "dunlapped" himself after hesawed too vigorously into the infrastructure of Sunbeam, crippling the company'sfuture growth and profitability. Now the company is in bankruptcy. Layoffs shouldbe seen as an indication of management's inability to lead a company toprofitability, Fraser says.
In some ways, White-Collar Sweatshop is an exasperating book. At several points, Fraser raises an obvious question: If things are so bad in corporate America, why don't employees do something about it? "The explanation is as complex as the corporate world," she says. She reports on some workers who simply got caught up in the excitement of the go-go eighties and allowed their jobs to swallow their lives. She notes that many professionals feel "a strong sense of attachment to--and identification with--their corporate parent." Those without such attachment often came to accept their conditions "because they realized they had little other choice." She also details the efforts of corporations to use publicity, marketing, and "spin" to influence opinions both inside and outside their workplaces.
And she notes that many professionals are literally invested in the system:"The people who put their savings in mutual funds were often the samewhite-collar men and women whose work lives began deteriorating" during the1980s. "We own stock, and as stockholders, all we care about is profits," saysone white-collar worker. "So we're the ones who are encouraging the conditionsthat make our work lives so awful." The net worth of these workers rose in thepast decade thanks mainly to increases in their 401(k) pension plans and realestate holdings. But that doesn't mean they don't need the salary as well. Theobvious reason workers don't rise up against their employers is that they areafraid of losing their paychecks.
Are tales of overwork and anger "simply the ramblings and complaints of smallnumbers of disgruntled workers, those who just could not keep up with thefast-paced program, as American businesses continued to reinvent and repositionthemselves to thrive ... [in the] global economy?" Fraser asks. But thatquestion, too, is not quite answered. Fraser has zeroed in on those workers withserious complaints (one woman told of being forced to work through the entirenight before her wedding). And she tapped into an extensive network of unhappyworkers who rail against employers in Internet chat rooms and on anticorporateWeb sites. By the end of the book, she even injects a note of optimism thatworkers are beginning to find ways to speak out and stand up for themselves.
Meanwhile, there is no widespread rebellion in corporate America, and onesuspects that a whole separate group of these workers is relatively content. Theycontinue commuting to their offices because they are getting what they need fromthese jobs. Most corporations provide medical benefits and pension plans. Manystill pay for employees to get advanced degrees and offer college scholarships totheir children. Lots of corporate jobs also give employees real opportunities todevelop their professional skills. Although the benefits of corporate life haveshrunk compared with what they were in the 1960s, it's still a gravy train by anymeasure.
In addition, companies often provide employees with prestige, purposefulness,and a sense of accomplishment. Since American culture glamorizes hard work, it'scommon for people in the first half of their careers to one-up each other on howlate they stay at the office. They like to be tested to see how well they canperform, and they feel proud to meet a challenge--the more daunting, the better.It's usually in the second half of their careers, when people expect to berewarded and promoted, that they begin to grouse if things don't work out. Thisis the group that Fraser focuses on. She has listened to so many of thedisgruntled that she seems to see the world only through their eyes.
In her conclusion, Fraser envisions a changed business world in whichexecutives no longer reward themselves with lavish compensation, in which theyhalt large-scale layoffs in favor of retraining programs, and in which they"commit to nurturing real cultural changes" that discourage overwork. At thesame time, it is a world in which employees embrace unionization, stockholdersand investors insist on socially responsible labor policies, and employerspromote employee stock ownership plans. How is all this to come about? To takejust one item on that wish list, how can companies forswear layoffs? Aren't therereal economic situations, perhaps like the one we are in now, in which a companymust make some cutbacks in order to survive?
The pain, anger, and sense of betrayal that Fraser reports on at great lengthare real. But she glorifies the bygone days in corporate America when largecompanies wrapped their workers in thick benefit blankets and worked them eightpredictable hours each day. During this period, the managers of American industrybecame more interested in counting their perks and planning their vacations thanin paying attention to the rising competition in the rest of the world. There isno going back to the 1950s, of course. The unsolved riddle is whether America'swhite-collar workers will move beyond venting in their electronic chat rooms andfinally begin to figure out ways to shape the modern workplace into a more humaneand reasonable environment.
