Redundancies take their toll not only on workers but also on their families. Anna Mundow reports on a US study that could have implications here as corporations come and go.
The photograph on the cover of Louis Uchitelle's new book tells the whole story. An executive wearing an immaculate blue shirt, dark trousers and well-groomed hair walks away from the camera, through a brightly-lit office. Under one arm he carries a large cardboard box. It contains what is left of his job, perhaps of his life. His hair is greying, his head slightly bowed, his face hidden. He has just become one of at least 30 million full-time workers who have been laid off in the US since the early 1980s and whose ranks are growing every day. He has heard it all: the government statistics boasting low unemployment; the corporate mantra of retraining; the self-help mantra of there being no problems, only opportunities. But he probably knows better. Banished from his cubicle, shirt sleeves rolled up, he likely knows that he is heading for a lower-wage job at best, empty days at worst. Accompanying him on that downward journey will be a cross section of the population, everyone from factory workers to Harvard alumni.
In the book, which is called The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences, Uchitelle tells the human story behind the economic headlines and reveals how a workplace phenomenon that is now an accepted fact of life constitutes "a debilitating national condition" and a threat to public health. "I did not think in the early stages of reporting for this book that I would be drawn so persistently into the psychiatric aspect of lay-offs," he admits. "But the emotional damage was too palpable to ignore."
As an economics writer for the New York Times, Uchitelle has seen all the statistics, even the ones showing that "for every percentage- point change in the unemployment rate, up or down, the national suicide rate rose or fell in tandem". Nevertheless, the hidden cost of lay-offs took him by surprise.
After meeting Erin Breen, an aircraft mechanic laid off by United Airlines in 2003, who was sliding into self-delusion, or Virginia Gibbs, the human-resources director of Citicorp, who found that her identity had vanished with her job, Uchitelle came to a startling conclusion: the disappearance of job security may damage the workforce more than any trend in recent history.
"For almost 100 years job security rose in this country," says Uchitelle. "Now for a whole generation, from the 1970s to the present, it's gone in the other direction. Never has that happened for so long a period. Nothing happening today is as bad as the 1930s, but out of the 1930s came laws that produced more job security. Not today."
Gibbs was rudely confronted with that fact in 1999. An embodiment of the American success story, Gibbs was first employed by Macy's department store as a saleswoman and by 1987 had risen to vice-president of employee relations. In her early 40s, single and childless, she later accepted a position as an executive in human resources at Citibank, where she frequently advised employees who had become casualties of outsourcing.
"A year into Gibbs's new assignment," Uchitelle learned, "Travelers Group [ an insurance company] acquired Citicorp, creating the largest banking organisation in the United States, and soon Gibbs realised that she had become as disposable as the back-office workers she had often helped." Gibbs recalls the subsequent elimination of her position as the equivalent of being told that "everything you think is important and do for your life's work isn't".
She took consulting jobs, did volunteer work and remained convinced that Citigroup, as the new company was named, would call her back in a crisis. That crisis arrived on September 11th, 2001, when a number of Citigroup employees died in the attack on the World Trade Center. Nobody phoned for help from Gibbs, who finally got the message. "For the first time I realised that I missed being needed in that organisation."
Stephen Holthausen knows the feeling. "What happened to him was the age of lay-offs at its cruellest," Uchitelle remarks, "theatrically cruel." On a Monday morning in 1990, Holthausen, who at 46 was vice-president for business lending at New England Savings Bank, was told that his position was being erased. A couple of weeks later he met the 22-year-old who had taken over his duties at a fraction of Holthausen's salary. "I was not terminated for failure," he told Uchitelle. "They just took the most expensive people and tossed them out. I was on the wrong end of the numbers." The Holthausens struggled as a strange hybrid: a middle-class family that qualified for food stamps and accepted church donations until Stephen found a job with the tourist board.
Most of the laid-off workers interviewed by Uchitelle recognise that they are casualties of global economic forces and business policies. At the same time, most of them take their dismissals personally and experience them as shameful. Like Holthausen, they know they were not terminated for failure, but the psychological blow is significant, as spouses are often the first to notice.
Stacy Prall began to see the change in Erin Breen, her husband, soon after United Airlines made him redundant. "I think the lay-off destroyed his self-esteem," she told Uchitelle. "When he fills out resumés and applies for jobs, you can see it is not with the extreme belief that he is going to get one. He waits until the last minute and gets the resumé in, but maybe doesn't get it in completely. I think that is because he is probably depressed."
Redundant employees are told that retraining is the answer when in fact, Uchitelle observes, "that's largely a myth, because the number of job openings out there is less than the number of qualified workers". They are encouraged to attend "lay-off boot camp", at which perky life and career counsellors urge them to take up yoga and to read Who Moved My Cheese?, an inspirational fable about successful and unsuccessful mice. "It's a very nice fairy tale to read to children," Uchitelle drily remarks, "but it's being sold to adults as a way to reconfigure your life."
When Uchitelle got his first newspaper job, in 1957, he correctly assumed it would turn into a career that would enable him to enter the middle class. "But today I know young people who talk about jobs, not careers. They would like a career, but they know they're not going to have one. They have forgotten - or they never knew - this nation's history of job security."
Whether working or middle class, he says, they are all part of the new "anxious class".
The Disposable American, by Louis Uchitelle, is published by Knopf, $25.95 in US