THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, September 4, 1995 TAG: 9509010014
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A8 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 60 lines
The American workplace is in dizzying transition. Many of the changes are for the better. Past rigidity has been replaced with new flexibility. Adversarial relations between management and labor were bad for business, adding unneeded costs and making innovation difficult. Those constraints are largely gone, but pendulums go to extremes.
We live in an era when huge numbers of jobs are vanishing in downsizing and mergers. Jobs are being transferred overseas. Out-sourcing replaces in-house help. Part-time work without benefits replaces full-time work. Poorly paid unskilled work replaces well-paid.
Reliable pensions and benefits are also vanishing. Self-directed, often self-funded plans are on the rise. Employers seek to change the law to permit them to pay for overtime in time off instead of dollars, but that's less money for employees who may already be strapped.
In Richmond, state environmental employees are asked if their job is really needed and even if it is, who could do it better or cheaper. Expecting workers to re-engineer themselves out the door is no longer unusual.
There's no question that work reforms are needed in an era of global competition and increasing automation. But shouldn't the key to an evolving workplace be the humane use of human beings? Social scientist Francis Fukayama worries that trust is essential to society and is vanishing in ours. We seem to be designing an every-man-for-himself culture. And that may not be good for the highly cooperative business of business.
Yet, management is often rewarded for treating workers as just another commodity. Fire 10,000 and Wall Street applauds. The same management consultants who invented corporate re-invention now warn that more businesses talk the talk than walk the walk when it comes to giving workers a share in the profits their skills produce.
For many American workers, the idea of a living wage has gone aglimmering. In many households, both adults must work to sustain a toehold in the middle class. Family life suffers. A growing gap between the well-paid and ill-paid threatens to turn American democracy into banana-republic oligarchy.
There are no easy answers in an era of what economist Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction - old industries and trades destroyed so the new can be created. Economic realities can't be repealed. But it does need to be recalled that relations between employers and employees aren't purely economic arrangements. They are part of a social contract that creates a stable society or undermines it.
Even on purely economic grounds, an obsession with short-term returns at the expense of long-term health is myopic. An enterprise that maltreats employees today for gain may have a hard time attracting them tomorrow for growth.
And employees are consumers as well. Their lack of prosperity eventually has an impact on their employers and the products they peddle. Lost jobs or diminished wages translate into lost sales and diminished consumption. Henry Ford was denounced as a traitor to his class when he paid his workers enough to buy his cars. His success taught a lesson we are in danger of forgetting. by CNB