Vicki Smith's Crossing the Great Divide
Neff, Gina
RECESSION' S HARSH light having awakened us from our dreams of a new economy, we're now looking bleary-eyed at what transpired in the boom-time 1990s. Opportunities seemingly abounded for the...
...unionized workers at a plywood plant undergoing "participative management" changes to stave off downsizing...
...I had no idea that you could be a temporary for the rest of your life...
...That's my idea of temporary service...
...Smith defines two broad forms of these risks...
...When "taking a shot at it," means knowing where to place one's bet, work begins to look more like a gamble on the difference between a growth stock and a dotbomb...
...Even the so-called "good" jobs are expendable, and as long as risktaking is seen as an individual's shot at opportunity, then the ability to see the structural reasons for this is threatened...
...STILL, THE cultural remnants of the boom tell American workers to manage these risks on their own...
...What these workers have in common is they have what used to be good, or at least stable, jobs...
...And I would, I would love for them to just take into consideration that— that we have tried hard, and we deserve a I 21-manent position...
...Before the crash, there seemed to be nothing but a perpetual "upside" in this strange new economy...
...The only hope is that the American workforce wakes up from stock market dreams to face the fact that they deserve much more of the real credit...
...Tom Peters urged us to become "free agents" and take our chances jumping between "Wow...
...As one permatemp, a former union member who now couldn't afford to buy his own health insurance put it, "I had the idea that if you work out, you turn permanent right away...
...As one of Smith's permatemps said, "I wish that one of these days that I could have a permanent job here...
...Take the risk, make the investment, and learn the skill, this ideology warns, or your cushy middle-class job will be as dead-end and expendable as the low-wage ones...
...Smith interviewed low-wage workers at a photocopy and mailroom services firm whose subcontracted jobs were secure as long as their firm's contracts were...
...The last economic expansion wasn't such a good period for most Americans...
...Dreams of cashing out early have faded, as individuals increasingly have to handle the "downside" of risk on their own...
...Second are the costs that corporations have been sloughing off for decades—for employees' training, pensions, health care, and other benefits—and that employees themselves increasingly must cover...
...Making it depends not on the whims of capital markets, but on one's own efforts and knowing the difference between a Microsoft and an Enron...
...By looking at how middle-class and workingclass jobs now share these elements of uncertainty, Smith is making an old-fashioned political economic argument...
...Agreeing to learn new skills while a temporary or marginal worker, accepting a job with limited mobility at a "good company," working under riskier conditions of limited benefits and guarantees mean that opportunities to get ahead—or even just to get a job—require taking more and more risks, which don't necessarily pay off...
...With all the talk about opportunities being created, Madeline, a forty-six-year-old unemployed environmental planner, echoed the frustration of many out-of-work professionals: "How can you treat this period as a period of opportunity when you don't know where to go...
...Work may indeed be riskier, Smith is arguing, but taking those risks is often the only option that seems available...
...Not sharing in the gains of the boom, most Americans now are exposed to the risks of recession...
...Like all good dreams, that of winning the stock market lottery had just enough grounding in reality to leave a vague sense of regret when it was over...
...Of course, as the Enron debacle shows, we're all paying for those dreams now...
...Work in general has become riskier, because "corporations no longer buffer their workers from the uncertainty of production and employment," and workers themselves "take risks and expend great personal and group resources to control that uncertainty...
...Smith questions the line between so-called "good" jobs offering opportunities, growth, and ongoing training on one side, and the marginal, dead-end "bad" jobs of low-wage work...
...One way they tried was to take a chance in a growing industry, and many of the workers felt frustration about figuring out where their chances were best...
...Vicki Smith argues that "temporariness and risk," have become intertwined with workers' expectations of opportunity and advancement, which were understood in the days of the old economy as the rewards for hard work or even dedication...
...126 n DISSENT / Spring 2002...
...Smith manages to compare such diverse groups of workers by examining how they all have individualized their employment situations...
...Stock holdings might have looked good "on paper," but in general, during the boom Americans blew what raises they did get on consumption and debt service...
...And we've really done a lot for the company, and we've shown a great amount of responsibility that we can be here and be dependable...
...For all of Tom Peters's free agents breaking the chains of organizational loyalty, temporary and contingent work has forced many who want a "real" job to settle for something much less...
...Taking risks during good times is one thing...
...But if you get downsized out, haven't managed your career, it's probably going to be a real problem...
...Of course, Smith's research was completed before the recession began, but including aspects of personal financial risk would have improved her account of risk and opportunity...
...Looking at the ways in wl ich the new economy boom didn't provide for workers like these—at even a blue chip computer company—may help workers demand more when the next boom begins...
...But the ethos of responsibility for your own job means that corporations can shirk theirs...
...Getting a permanent job these days, in the words of one of the computer company temps, is "like rolling dice...
...What were once stable union jobs have been retooled and are now economically riskier and less likely to be unionized...
...She argues that corporate America increasingly expects workers to bear the burden of economic risks in jobs across the "post-industrial terrain," as flexibility demands all workers adapt to more uncertainty on the job, fewer benefits, and less room to advance...
...At one point such a gamble seemed like a savvy career move, just as people clamored to put their Social Security funds with their retirement savings into their stock portfolios...
...Companies now provide employees with even less protection from economic volatility...
...Opportunities seemingly abounded for the middle class to get ahead: from middle-class dreams of a share of corporate gains through stock options or 401(k)s to the "just like you and me" personas of Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and the Beardstown Ladies' Investment Club...
...You know, if anything, they've bypassed us...
...what's going to happen, so I took a shot at it...
...The American middle class entered the recession without wage increases that matched productivity gains, with historic levels of household debt, with a greater relative share of income tax burdens, and with a relatively smaller percentage DISSENT / Spring 2002 n 125 BOOKS of equity in their homes, the largest category of middle-class assets...
...And getting one's foot temporarily in the door may not mean that you're treated like an insider, as permatemps have learned...
...For all of Robert Reich's supposed "symbolic analysts" who were to have blithely sailed through the economic changes of the last decade, workers in Smith's study were struggling to keep up even during the boom...
...Stock options instead of a paycheck...
...For example, Mike, a computer programmer in his early forties, gives this view of why he's still out of work after his layoff: "The upshot is if you manage your career well it probably won't be a problem if you get downsized...
...You don't know as a contract worker...
...temporary workers at a major computer company whose contracts can (and did) end abruptly...
...124 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 BOOKS and unemployed professionals and managers at a job search club...
...An ideology of entrepreneurial labor holds that the only way to get ahead is by taking these chances, and failure is the result of poor career management...
...projects rather than settle for the fuddy-duddy stability of a full-time job...
...Although Smith wouldn't disagree that some jobs truly are "bad," she points out that privileged workers now share in many of the same elements of marginality, expendability, and insecurity as their low-wage peers...
...Crossing the Great Divide is an exposé of the downside of the risk in the new economy...
...A job well done no longer guarantees a good job, or even a job...
...GINA NEFF is a graduate student in sociology at Columbia University and a fellow in the Center on Organizational Innovation...
...First is in the general instability of contemporary work...
...being left completely alone in a recession is quite another...
...Like Mike, many of those Smith interviewed saw economic changes like downsizing as out of their control, but clung to the belief that they themselves had power to "manage" their way around those changes...
...Managers and professionals once thought that their skills could protect them from long periods of job hunting...
...But the job ladder and workplace mobility no longer extend to the mailroom, where companies have outsourced even formerly entry-level jobs...
...The thirty-year collapse in wages, increase in insecurity, lack of job guarantees, and increasingly risky economy ventures have pushed structural economic uncertainty onto workers who now blame themselves for not being able to make it...
Vol. 49 • April 2002 • No. 2
