Steven Greenhouse's The Big Squeeze and David Kusnet's Love the Work,Hate the Job
Metzgar, Jack
THE BIG SQUEEZE: TOUGH TIMES FOR THE AMERICAN WORKER by Steven Greenhouse Knopf, 2008 345 pp $25.95 LOVE THE WORK, HATE THE JOB: WHY AMERICA'S BEST WORKERS ARE UNHAPPIER THAN EVER by David...
...Kusnet, who has worked for unions and was the ghost writer on John Sweeney's America Needs a Raise, expertly details the creative strategy and tactics involved in doing that...
...JACK METZGAR is Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Social Justice, Roosevelt University, Chicago...
...After distributing the specific bequests listed above Ito others in your will), I leave the remainder of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...Somebody has to decide to fire a Federal Express truck driver because she has ovarian cancer, and somebody has to tell her she won't be "rehired" as an independent contractor...
...Aviation Week agreed, commenting that Boeing displayed "a mindless preoccupation with cutting costs," thereby losing "the adventurous engineering that made the U.S...
...His primary focus is on professional and technical workers, but because one designated "hook" is Seattle at the millennium, he throws in a chapter on the 1998-2000 strike and lockout of the Steelworkers at Kaiser Aluminum and another on a successful organizing campaign of the Service Employees (SEIU) at Northwest Hospital and Medical Center...
...But the result is better than you might expect—partly because Greenhouse has mastered labor market economics in a way few journalists do and partly because his profiles and sketches are so rich in evoking sympathy and understanding for workers who struggle to both adapt and resist...
...Meanwhile, the book's primary focus on "permatemps" at Microsoft and engineers and technicians at Boeing is limited to what happened in Seattle, and though Kusnet makes some sweeping claims about "knowledge workers," he does little to provide a larger context...
...The result is that WalMart managers almost never have enough workers to do all the work that needs done, and they engage in a variety of illegal activities officially condemned by Bentonville...
...There is also a large pool of excess capital available for the purpose, making the threat of wage-push inflation negligible if not nonexistent...
...Kusnet comments that engineers "responded not only as angry workers but almost like jilted lovers...
...Neoliberals just don't mention it in public...
...I bequeath $ to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...Somebody has to decide not to purchase the safety guards that would protect workers' hands at Landis Plastics, and somebody has to push those workers to keep their hands moving in ways that will inevitably threaten them...
...Greenhouse is a far better guide to this wing of "knowledge workers...
...That this basic principle of economics is now seen as equivalent to believing in the tooth fairy is testament to the power of neoliberal ideology...
...When a fellow cashier, who told this story to Greenhouse, shut down her own station to relieve this worker, she was disciplined by the full-time manager who had created the situation in the first place...
...Your brain wants to believe that what you're doing really isn't wrong...
...Microsoft has about 14,000 permanent employees at its legendary Redmond facilities, plus another 6,000 contract workers who are officially "temporary," though many have worked there for years on a long series of contracts...
...For Greenhouse it's simply the cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) plus the annual improvement factor (AIF) first inscribed in the so-called Treaty of Detroit in the 1948 and 1950 negotiations between General Motors and the United Auto Workers and subsequently spread to most union workers and, as a more intangible principle, to all workers in the aggregate...
...Kusnet wasn't thinking of what has happened to meatpacking in the past twenty years when he wrote, "In today's United States, work is getting better, but jobs are getting worse...
...Wages, benefits, and economic security ("jobs") are getting worse, but so is the content of the work...
...Old trend: most workers "disliked the content of their work but liked the wages, the benefits, and the overall economic security provided by their jobs...
...It is the kind of book you would expect from a New York Times "labor and workplace reporter," skillfully combining what "studies have shown" about various workplace trends (almost all bad) with concrete stories about workers and workplaces that illustrate these trends...
...That's the social contract...
...His greater conceptual coherence and his various stories show how brutalizing it can be for managers today to summon up the requisite meanness to keep the lower tiers cheap and under control...
...Moreover, Greenhouse builds on a rich academic, journalistic, and think-tank literature on low-wage workers, union organizing efforts, and the general deterioration of living and working standards, as well as on a rich vein of workplace activism in the labor movement...
...She unloaded her considerable knowledge, anger, and guilt to Greenhouse, concluding, "I feel bad that part of me wasn't a very nice person when I was at Wal-Mart...
...Gathered together like this and placed within the larger analytic framework discussed above, The Big Squeeze becomes the one essential book on today's American workplace...
...But when you're wrapped up in that type of corporate culture, you got to do what you got to do...
...Much of this will be familiar to Dissent BOOKS readers...
...gross domestic product) that is being transferred from workers to 100 n DISSENT / Summer 2008 profits (corporate and otherwise) and, to an extraordinary degree, to the top 1 percent of income earners...
...When the company started to treat us as a cost, not a partner," one engineer explained, "people took great offense...
...In mainstream discourse today that makes Kuttner seem like a tax-and-spend liberal gone nuts, but it wouldn't if the magnitude of the productivity transfer were more widely understood...
...Kusnet tells the story of four workplace struggles in the Seattle area in 2000, the year after the iconic Battle in Seattle reshaped how and where the World Trade Organization could conduct its business...
...DISSENT / Summer 2008 • 10 BOOKS A LEGACY OF IDEAS A bequest of any size can be of lasting benefit to Dissent and help ensure that the ideas and beliefs you hold dear will continue to have a public forum...
...and the special punishments for younger workers entering postcontract workplaces with no "grandfathering" to protect them...
...One of his stories involves a Wal-Mart cashier who was denied permission to go to the restroom by her supervisor, and, as a result, menstruated blood on the floor at her station...
...Kusnet's book suffers from a confusion of story "pegs" and "hooks," which make a conceptual mish-mash of his various "themes...
...But there is a neglected third option, which, even though it is a classic "win-win" situation, is actually much more common than either of the first two...
...We knowledge workers often love our work, and we benefit economically from the low wages of the cleaners, carers, cooks, office clerks, and customerservice representatives who serve us—and whose jobs are multiplying even faster than ours...
...Kusnet is right, of course, that there are growing numbers of jobs for "knowledge workers," which could be broadly defined as professional and managerial workers, now about one-third of the workforce...
...Not Steve Greenhouse...
...Greenhouse mentions it, more than once, and it is one of the great strengths of The Big Squeeze that its highly controlled but fully expressed rage at workplace indignities and injustices is not based on a broader vision of a just society but simply on the high-handed abrogation of the Treaty of Detroit...
...For more specifics on this or other information on gift planning, feel free to phone or write Dissent, 310 Riverside Drive #2008, New York, N.Y...
...the demise of unions and pensions...
...One of the most widespread is simply erasing hours worked from computerized time cards, and BOOKS thus not paying for them...
...The results of this reversal are thoroughly documented in The Big Squeeze and, to a lesser extent, in David Kusnet's Love the Work, Hate the Job...
...There's a chapter on Wal-Mart, for example, and a longish section on Costco for comparison...
...When Kusnet reads The Big Squeeze, he'll realize how wrong and phony this is...
...If it is the best seller it deserves to be, it should bring a much wider, larger audience to the struggle for workplace justice...
...Together they detail the miserable conditions for most workers in most workplaces today, from the "working poor" to a large subset of "knowledge workers...
...Writing in the American Prospect (March 2008) Bob Kuttner found $600 billion in new tax revenues from corporations and rich households that could be used to spur sustainable economic growth and to adequately fund entitlements, including universal health care...
...MOST MANAGERIAL workers are probably more like Melissa Jenkins, who worked her way up as a store manager in Decatur, Indiana, until she quit and filed a sex discrimination lawsuit...
...WashTech does not have a collective bargaining agreement and does not collect dues from a majority of what Kusnet calls "cyber proles," but it represents them nonetheless...
...What's more, he does the math...
...Our legal name is the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...DAVID KUSNET'S book, Love the Work, Hate the Job: Why America's Best Workers Are Unhappier Than Ever, though much more narrowly focused and more breezily written, is a useful add-on because it shows the deterioration of workplace standards for relatively privileged workers who have a smaller presence in Greenhouse's broader survey...
...Greenhouse didn't interview that manager, but he did talk with others at Wal-Mart who explained the Bentonville benchmarks they must consistently meet to preserve their place in a higher tier...
...What's more, as all the recent allusions to the Great Depression suggest, we are now in a classic Keynesian crisis of underconsumption, hidden for decades in mountains of consumer debt...
...So, too, with managerial workers, most of whom are frontline supervisors struggling unsuccessfully to make it to the middle tiers...
...There was a significant and mysterious decline in the rate of growth of productivity in the 1970s and 1980s, and in Greenhouse's sense of the social contract, that should have led to a slowing of the improvement in wages and standards...
...To think I would compromise my morals and values for them...
...Even without them, there is a $22,000 gap...
...It is rigorously enforced on a store-by-store, week-by-week basis...
...But whatever credibility those goals may once have had, there is none left...
...THE BIG SQUEEZE: TOUGH TIMES FOR THE AMERICAN WORKER by Steven Greenhouse Knopf, 2008 345 pp $25.95 LOVE THE WORK, HATE THE JOB: WHY AMERICA'S BEST WORKERS ARE UNHAPPIER THAN EVER by David Kusnet Wiley & Sons, 2008 270 pp $25.95 _M ANY LABOR scholars find the concept of a "postwar social contract" a little light in the socks, too intangible to be useful and too optimistic about the potential of capitalism to be desirable...
...Though real-life situations vary, the basic principle that productivity growth can pay for both increased wages and increased profits while putting no upward pressure on prices is not contested within mainstream, free-market economics...
...the increase in work hours and the resulting stress on children and families...
...He also explains how both Microsoft and Boeing may be undermining their own long-term economic interests by treating their workers as nothing but costs...
...10025 (212) 316-3120...
...As Greenhouse shows in depth and scope, both the work and the jobs of most 102 n DISSENT / Summer 2008 workers are being systematically degraded...
...Others are on outsourcing...
...Kusnet explains how these permatemps are exploited and the lengths to which Microsoft has gone to preserve and extend that exploitation...
...Thirty years ago it might have been necessary to constrain the growth of real wages, to increase profit rates, and to jigger taxes so as to remedy a capital shortage...
...2. You can leave a specific percentage of your estate...
...the rise of contingent and temporary workers...
...Those cuts simply add to the annual gross transfer of income, wealth, and life possibilities...
...Even Democratic politicians seem sometimes to realize that restoring economic growth will require us to stop throwing money at rich people and start getting it into paychecks...
...New trend: "it's the other way around: they like what they do every day, but they're dissatisfied with the economic insecurity and frustrated with the obstacles to doing their best work...
...DISSENT / Summer 2008 103...
...Instead, what we have gotten is a reversal—a 15 percent decline in real weekly wages for production and nonsupervisory workers and a shredding of health insurance, pensions, workplace health and safety, work-family balance, and lots of basic dignity...
...union fights at Tyson and Smithfield food companies...
...In a growing economy a productivity increase of, say, 2 percent means that real wages can go up by 2 percent while profits also increase by at least 2 percent with no increase in prices...
...If the fruits of productivity growth had been shared since the 1970s as they had been for the preceding quarter-century, the average full-time worker would be earning $22,000 more than she or he is earning today—$58,000 instead of $36,000...
...This is not a goal or a guideline...
...While most retailers try to keep payroll costs in the range of 8 percent to 12 percent of sales revenue, the Bentonville benchmark is 5.5 percent to 8 percent...
...Raising wages in a recession is especially difficult, but it is the only way to get the economy growing again on a sustained basis...
...I bequeath percent of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...the impact of globalization...
...Another way to pay for wage increases, of course, is by reducing profits, but this is routinely assumed to be bad, supposedly because it could eventually lead to job loss...
...Reading The Big Squeeze as it visits so many different workplaces and gives voice to so many different kinds of workers, you might get the impression that work life in America today involves an individual choice between low wages and miserable conditions, on the one hand, or compromising your morals and values, on the other That's why Greenhouse's narrow sense of the social contract and the $22,000-per-worker-peryear violation of it are so valuable...
...Still, the Microsoft and Boeing workers' stories are important in themselves, and Kusnet tells them with verve...
...Some of the worst stories have nothing (directly) to do with wages, but let's keep our eyes on wages and productivity for the moment...
...Most managers probably do their best to try and maintain their moral compass, but it's hard...
...Greenhouse brings freshness to most of these subjects...
...DISSENT / Summer 2008 • 99 BOOKS Most public discourse about wages assumes that increased wages automatically lead to price increases (and thus to inflation), as if we still had a series of oligopolies and regulated industries that allowed employers to pass on wage increases to consumers without consequence...
...But like Microsoft's permatemps (or those at Hewlett-Packard, in Greenhouse's account), we are often organized into separate tiers with decidedly different fates, as in my craft, where course-by-course adjuncts now outnumber fulltime professors...
...It's also not about the Reagan-Bush II tax cuts for the rich...
...Psychopaths and sadists naturally excel at this kind of work, but there are not nearly enough of them to manage all the "retail salespersons" that the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects as the occupation with the largest job growth from now to 2016...
...Greenhouse's Squeeze is not a book about policy, however, and his last chapter on how to right the wrongs he documents, while serviceable, is undistinguished...
...For more than a quartercentury, from 1947 into the 1970s, wages, incomes, working conditions, and living standards improved steadily and dramatically...
...If this were understood more widely, our policy discussions would be focused on two things they are not now: how to increase wages across the board, but especially for the bottom four-fifths of workers, and how to use progressive taxation to recover at least some of the money that has already been stolen in the workplace over the last three decades...
...aerospace industry dominant and innovative...
...The postwar social contract explicitly allowed for lots of that...
...Frontline supervisors pretend not to do it, and top managers pretend not to require it as they ratchet down their cost benchmarks...
...We ask you to consider one of the following options: 1. You can leave a specific amount or a particular asset...
...This is an average, obscuring large racial, gender, and occupational disparities, but it amounts to some $2.5 trillion a year (about 18 percent of U.S...
...Kusnet provides a fascinating account of how this minority union developed and what it has accomplished using Internet-based internal organizing, public exposure, and state and federal labor laws...
...Workers' standard of living should go up, in "real" terms adjusted for inflation, exactly to the extent that productivity increases...
...This is not about inequality of income and wealth...
...In The Big Squeeze, the postwar social contract between workers and capitalists was simply about sharing the gains of productivity growth...
...3. You can leave the remainder of your estate...
...Both are interesting stories well told, but he wastes a lot of time and loses clarity trying to fit these situations into his title theme...
...Boeing engineers won a six-week strike with a minority of the bargaining unit actually on strike and with no strike benefits...
...Boeing engineers clearly love their work designing and building airplanes, and in their strike slogan, "On strike for Boeing," they articulated a credible claim that they represented the company, not the financial numbers-crunchers who had taken over and were trashing its proud engineering tradition...
...Though socialists like me were often contemptuous of the treaty back in the day, it sure looks good now that it's gone...
...The larger generalizations Kusnet draws from these well-told case studies are superficial newsmagazine trend-spotting—where new trends are, conveniently, exactly the opposite of old ones, which they replace in their entirety...
...Thus, if you use the postwar social contract of America's "mixed economy" as your only measure of economic justice, every full-time worker is owed $22,000 for the work done last year, and another $22,000 for the work being done this year...
...Whether it's living wage laws and union protections and workplace law enforcement well beyond the Employee Free Choice Act or increased social wages through universal health insurance and large increases in the Earned Income Tax Credit, among others, there are now well-defined and increasingly popular ways to go about restoring that social contract...
...And, as Squeeze shows with poignancy and depth, it is also the only way for us to recover our civic integrity so that we can get back to treating each other not as costs to be avoided but as fellow workers and citizens to and from whom a decent level of moral reciprocity is owed...
...In response, a group of them, with help from the Communications Workers (CWA), has formed the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers (WashTech...
Vol. 55 • July 2008 • No. 3
