Dialogue
Louis Uchitelle Charts the Rise and Fall of Job Security in America

In 1996, Louis Uchitelle was a lead reporter for the award-winning New York Times series on the downsizing of America. His concern about the rising tide of corporate layoffs led him to conduct scores of interviews with CEOs and laid-off workers, and to explore the history of job security in America. The result was the publication early this year of The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences (Knopf), a sometimes harrowing account of the assault on the job security of
middle-class and highly-skilled blue collar workers in America.

In the book, Uchitelle interviews three executives who ran Stanley Works, the tool manufacturer. Over time, the CEOs became increasingly willing to outsource jobs and engage in massive layoffs. He charts the plight of laid-off United Airlines mechanics, struggling to find meaningful employment, and a human resources director at Citigroup, who participated in laying off workers only to become the victim of a layoff herself. New Vision recently interviewed Uchitelle about his book.

New Vision: What did you learn in the writing of The Disposable American that surprised you most?

Louis Uchitelle: I got to know people who had been laid off, middle class people.

I came to realize that they blamed themselves for their own layoffs. I would argue with them that it was a social phenomenon. They would talk about their own bad luck.

We as a society reinforce that—Democrats and Republicans alike—by saying, no problem; you can segue from the job that you lost in the layoff to one of the very good jobs out there if you go through training and education. And if you fail to get one of the very good jobs out there, which most people who are laid off fail to do, well again, it’s your fault because you didn’t do something right.

In this society, when we lay someone off, we effectively tell them that they don’t have value, and it is very damaging to self esteem, and I began to see as I tracked people over months at a time that their behavior changed, not in radical ways but in subtle ways. One of the greatest changes is the great reluctance to go through the trauma of a lay-off again, and so they withdraw from the workforce or take jobs that are safe but beneath their skills. I talked to psychiatrists about it, and sure enough they said that the layoff is a traumatic experience, quite apart from the trauma of being unemployed. They are running across it in their therapy.

What we have then is 30 million layoffs, at least, since the early ‘80s. Not everyone is damaged. But there is damage to the mental health of the vast majority of those people. It’s a public health hazard, and if we took that into consideration we might push back against layoffs. I’m in no way arguing that we can stop layoffs. We don’t have the hegemony as an economic power that we had before. But we can certainly reduce them, and if we considered the damage to mental health as a social phenomenon, we might generate the public pressure to push back against layoffs.

NV: In the book, you chart the decline of job security in America. You talk about how massive layoffs—like the kind undertaken by General Motors and Delphi—have become standard management practice. How did that come to pass?

LU: I tell the story of the rise of job security going back to the 19th century. I talk also about the dismantling. And as we gradually dismantled it, starting in the mid-1970s, we acquiesced and we literally forgot what job security was. So now we have General Motors and Ford engaging in massive layoffs, and we accept that. Contrast that with the Chrysler Corporation back in the late 1970s when it was having great trouble. There were somewhat different circumstances, but there was a public element to the discussion.

The government came through with a big loan guarantee that greatly helped Chrysler to survive. I don’t know if the same type of solution is possible now with Ford or General Motors, or even appropriate. What is striking is that we don’t even discuss the social dimensions of what is happening. We leave it entirely to the companies, and they are solving the problems mainly by cutting labor costs.

NV: Your book examines the plight of middle-class workers or highly-skilled blue collar workers who fall victim to layoffs. What do these workers have in common with the kind of low wage workers that LAANE advocates for?

LU: There’s a lot that’s been written about impoverished workers. My point about middle-class and blue-collar workers is that they are all going through a similar process. My book makes the point that one of the ways that we’ve acquiesced to layoffs is that we’ve allowed wages to deteriorate so much that at the low end the jobs aren’t valued by either the worker or the employer, and the turnover is sometimes 100 percent or more a year.

When you undervalue the job, you build layoffs into the structure. We did, in the past, through collective bargaining and through rising minimum wages, avoid such low-wage work. And I think the SEIU and other unions are working to turn these jobs into self-respecting work, and that’s a solution.

NV: In your day-to-day reporting and in your writing of this book, what trends do you see in the economy that give you hope for a better future for the American worker?

LU: In the early ‘90s, when the layoffs were spreading into the white-collar world, there was a reaction, a public reaction that came around ’96. Pat Buchanan’s good showing in the Republican presidential primary that year was part of it. So was our downsizing series. The Clinton Administration’s reaction was to say that government would subsidize education and retraining so that the laid-off could segue into well-paying jobs at a time when job creation was strong. And that didn’t happen as advertised.

Now there is a new reaction beginning to take place, and this might be a moment when we can have a debate again about job security and its importance in a healthy economy. It’s a debate that is going on in other industrial countries, and we should join in, too. I think the efforts that community organizations are making to address labor problems are part of a solution, but it has to be on a broader scale.