ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 21, 1996 TAG: 9601200007
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALAN SORENSEN EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
IN THE beginning of this year, AT&T announced plans to eliminate 40,000 jobs, and the markets saw that it was good.
The stock price shot up $2.60 a share on the news. Only by downsizing, analysts agreed, can the phone company be fruitful and multiply in a deregulated telecommunications marketplace.
Meanwhile, say the indicators, America's five-year economic expansion continues without rest, albeit slowly. Inflation rates remain low; corporate profits, healthy. The stock market, though slipping a bit in recent weeks, shows abiding confidence in the economy and in its pious servants at the Federal Reserve. Praise be.
And yet, within this vast drama, are the AT&T 40,000 and their families content to play the roles allotted them? Will they keep the faith that the market knows better than they what is right?
It's enough to remind one of the question a tormented Job asked in the Bible. In essence: If God is both good and all-powerful, why am I, a good person, suffering so?
Here we have AT&T's CEO, Robert Allen, committing a multitude of management sins. Yet his company prospers and he pulls down $5 million a year - while laid-off innocents scramble for their livelihoods.
Today's economic equivalent of Job's lament might be: If the awesomely beneficent and powerful economy is doing so well, how come my wages barely keep up with inflation, my family and I have to struggle just to run in place, and I live in fear of being struck down one day in a downsizing from on high?
What happened, in other words, to the social covenant according to which, if I work hard and live right, I can basically count on a better future?
I invoke Job to point out that the issue of unjust suffering has been around since, well, since whenever - a lot longer, certainly, than the general economic security that developed in postwar America.
Across the millennia, attempts to explain this issue have tended to follow a few well-trodden paths - none of which ends with an answer at once straightforward and satisfying.
Like Job's friends who tried to comfort him with the glib moralizing of ideologues, some people nowadays assure the economically insecure to place their trust in the market; adversity, after all, builds character. Others, finding no one innocent, assume that AT&T's outplaced legions must deserve their fate.
Some seek unlikely prophets, a Newt Gingrich perhaps, who mouth quick and confident answers to the problem. Others seek someone to blame: the rich perhaps, or (more likely) politicians, bureaucrats, free-traders, feminists, immigrants, minorities, Jews, homosexuals, welfare dependents, liberals. Take your pick.
Behind capitalism's roll of the dice, some hear Satan's laughter, or discern a spiritless universe utterly indifferent to our struggles. Others marvel how the economy works in mysterious ways. Still others, like the voice raging to Job from the whirlwind, demand to know how we presume to question so powerful a force, creator of the things we have.
Personally, I'm inclined neither to demonize nor to worship the market.
Labor Secretary Robert Reich is right when he says: "Surely the ultimate test of competitiveness should be the standard of living of Americans." But, just as surely, the standard of living is raised by uplifting productivity. Markets are the best means yet discovered for producing wealth, and they can't perform this function without continuous, creative destruction.
Which is why there's no point in keeping a telephone company uncompetitively large. Telecommunications, indeed, should benefit from continued deregulation as young Davids arise to challenge Goliaths - creating new jobs in the process.
Sorry, but the old paternalistic, lifetime job security for workers who did as they were told is rightly as well as inevitably obsolete. In a knowledge-based economy, successful enterprises will foster continuous learning for employees empowered to take responsibility for their collective performance. Such enterprises also will recognize that stakeholders in the business include not just stockholders, but employees, customers, suppliers and communities.
Businesses failing to attract the best and retain the loyal will shrivel, meantime, thereby promoting the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Employees of a myopically managed firm, according to this scenario, would strive to change it while improving their own skills, or abandon it to sell their skills elsewhere. To do otherwise would be to forfeit control over one's destiny.
And yet, the coin has another side. Democracy can't long survive if the promise of a better future is limited to a wealthy elite. Economies work best, it seems to me, when there is a shared commitment to ease the vicissitudes of the marketplace and help along the adjustments it requires of people. Don't forget: We created the market for our ends; it didn't create us.
None of which theorizing may satisfy our modern Job, about to be laid off by AT&T or otherwise slapped around by the market's invisible hand. But perhaps, like the old gospel song says, "Farther along, we'll understand why."
LENGTH: Medium: 92 linesby CNB