Age Works: What Corporate America Must Do to Survive the Graying of the Workforce

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The aging of the baby boomers could cause a severe labor shortage--an "economic catastrophe"--and many businesses are unprepared, according to Beverly Goldberg. In Age Works, Goldberg says there are not enough younger workers to replace the mass of retiring baby boomers in the coming decades. If businesses are to succeed amid "this demographic shock wave," they need to adopt a "new social contract" with workers, especially skilled ones. A lot of older workers are currently retiring early because of downsizing and age discrimination, writes Goldberg, vice president of the Century Foundation, a New York think tank. She writes: "Corporate America will be forced to create a work environment that will turn a graying, disillusioned workforce into eager workers. This challenge is enormous." Goldberg points to corporations such as McDonald's and Days Inn that are already creating the sorts of flexible, part-time jobs with benefits and promotion opportunities that attract retirees back to work. She details how Oracle and GTE fill technology jobs with innovative training programs for older workers. Age Works is intriguing reading for business leaders worried about their future staffing needs, as well as for anyone interested in the far-reaching effects of aging baby boomers on the economy as a whole. --Dan Ring

Book Description

We Americans have always thought of ourselves as a young country -- brash, innovative, full of vigor. However, the uncomfortable truth is that America is getting older. The nation's median age was twenty-five in the 1960s, but today more than half of us are over thirty-five. By the middle of the next century, there will be more Americans in their seventies than in their teens. This demographic shift will transform all aspects of our society, but nowhere will its effects be more evident than in America's workplaces. In ten years, the massive baby-boom generation will begin to reach retirement age, but few companies have paid attention to the fact that there are not enough younger workers to replace them. The challenge to corporate America, as Beverly Goldberg argues in Age Works, is to reinvent the workplace to make it better fit the needs of all employees, especially the older workers it must retain in order to thrive.

The task will not be easy. The waves of downsizing, outsourcing, and cost-cutting of the 1980s and 1990s created a generation of disillusioned employees, many of whom now eagerly look forward to retirement as a way to escape the anxieties of corporate life. More Americans than ever are retiring early, but what is most surprising about these early retirees is that they are not spending their days playing tennis, golf, or shuffleboard. Rather, they are starting businesses, doing volunteer work, and pursuing intellectual interests. They are working, just not within the corporate world.

The challenge to the business community, Goldberg argues, is to find ways to hold on to these talented individuals. Age Works shows how corporations such as Whirlpool, GTE, and Days Inns have changed their corporate cultures to be more receptive to the needs of older workers. Goldberg debunks the myths about older workers' capabilities, showing how forward-looking companies have successfully taught high-tech skills to a generation that was not brought up with computers. She also proposes innovative reforms for the way we think about the concept of retirement itself, offering new ways of thinking about pensions, Social Security, mentoring programs, flex-time, and flex jobs.

With effective tips for rebuilding company loyalty without making guarantees of lifetime employment, Age Works is an indispensable guide for employers who must respond to a rapidly changing workforce. It is also essential reading for all Americans who are concerned about our nation's economic vitality in the twenty-first century.

Customer Reviews:

Age Works.......2000-08-26

If managers think they have problems attracting and retaining human capital in today's economy, they haven't seen anything yet. Get set for the massive wave of retirements over the next ten (10) years. Beverly Goldberg conveys a compelling picture of why managers need to learn the value of recognizing, retraining, and retaining older workers. Age Works is a wakeup call to those caught up in the wastefulness of our "throw away" society. Older workers are a precious resource that can ill afford to be squandered. Ms. Goldberg demonstrates a better path and presents concrete ways for managers to benefit from the graying of America.

Where to find older workers?.......2000-04-13

I read Age Works with great interest since I have been involved with this problem for 25 years and have recently published a web site exclusively for older workers. It is a free non- profit referral service. Go to seniorjobbank.org

Where Have All the Workers Gone?.......2000-03-06

Workers these days are like snow shovels in a South Carolina blizzard - not enough to go around. Some of the causes are simple statistics: economy up, unemployment down, working-age population falling, employers' demand outstripping supply. But others are cultural. Large corporations, the traditional source of jobs, are often perceived as uncaring engines of depletion, exhaustion, and downsizing. The young are choosing options, from lifestyle to stock, while workplace veterans opt for the dignity of early retirement over the desolation of forced termination. Employers' alternatives are stark: expand their supply, increase their appeal, or prepare for shortfalls and belt-tightening. Recruitment, retention, recession - remorse.

Were companies to examine their own assumptions on hiring and firing, they would find a pervasive and self-destructive premise: old is bad. But as Beverly Goldberg argues in _Age Works_, employers - indeed, society as a whole - have built this premise on an ill-considered, ill-defined congeries of prejudices and presuppositions. Believe it or not, Americans age 55 and above take fewer sick days, adapt to new technologies successfully, and are more loyal to their employer than are their colleagues thirty years younger. And perhaps more importantly, they may be the only untapped workforce available. As hidebound organizations throw fortunes at untested youth, others more far-seeing (including Travelers, GTE, and Baxter Health Care) actively recruit, train, and depend upon senior workers. In a shrinking labor market, corporations and their HR departments may find a surprising competitive advantage in coaxing older employees away from the brink of an often sterile and impoverished retirement.

Eager to dismiss this challenge to their standard practices, naysayers and doomsayers will demand proof. Fortunately _Age Works_ reads more like a position paper than a business book, and like any good position paper, it's loaded with facts. Age Works is the ideal volume for anyone itching for a statistical analysis of the American workforce 1950-2050, in all its hues and strata. Arguably Goldberg's love of statistics verges on addiction, but in the pharmacy of authorial dependence, statistics are a pretty benign habit. More distracting, although again less than fatal, is the book's policy-wonk style. Goldberg stands foursquare in the school of tell-`em-what-you're-going-to-tell-`em, tell-`em-, tell-`em-what-you-told-`em, and _Age Works_ sometimes reads like an executive summary that cannot bear to end.

Nonetheless, _Age Works_ is a cogent, serious, undeniably well-supported piece. Even those who resist the proposed solutions (admittedly the book's weakest section) will find the diagnosis difficult to dispute. Like it or not, America's workforce will continue to grow smaller and grayer over the next twenty years. And by the time the population bounces back, corporations' hiring practices will have appealed to all ages - or to none.

Graying Means Payoff.......2000-03-03

For a decade we've heard a steady chorus of despair about the graying of America--that graying means paying, in the words of one leading credit. Beverly Goldberg, in this carefully researched, tightly argued, fluidly written, and ultimately extremely important book, shows us a different path. She demonstrates that older Americans are a potential boon to the economy and to the bottom line of forward thinking companies. She shows that they are a group that brings considerable experience and great stability to those that will make use of their talents. And she supplies a roadmap for how we can get there--as indivuals, as companies, and as a society. A great read and a great contribution to the growing body of literature about navigating what may well be the great demographic transition in our country's history, the aging of America.

Powerful ideas re: the aging workplace.......2000-02-29

Since the idea of totally retiring is not something that appeals to me, I found the suggestions for building different kinds of flexible work arrangements very thought-provoking. The numbers in the first couple of chapters will help build a compelling case for allowing those who want such arrangements to have them. I also found the stories of those who wanted out fascinating-they are an indictment of companies for the ways they handled downsizing and mergers. It clearly is time for all businesses to rethink their dealings with the people who work for them and to reconsider the value of older workers.

Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public

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trenchant, wide-ranging analysis of the last century
Important Message, A Strain to Read
How Politics Became Personalized

Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public
Matthew A. Crenson , and Benjamin Ginsberg
Manufacturer: The Johns Hopkins University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0801878861

Book Description

In Downsizing Democracy, Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg describe how the once powerful idea of a collective citizenry has given way to a concept of personal, autonomous democracy. Today, political change is effected through litigation, lobbying, and term limits, rather than active participation in the political process, resulting in narrow special interest groups dominating state and federal decision-making. At a time when an American's investment in the democratic process has largely been reduced to an annual contribution to a political party or organization, Downsizing Democracy offers a critical reassessment of American democracy.

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trenchant, wide-ranging analysis of the last century.......2004-07-19

This book ranges very widely in support of its theme that the democratic decline in America is due to shifts in our system and is not the fault of individual citizens. In the process of exploring this theme, this book offers a fairly comprehensive review of U.S. politics over the last century.

Its theme is encapsulated in the chapter title: "From Popular to Personal Democracy," and summarized with the words "In fact, Americans have sacrificed something of citizenship itself. Proper citizens have a collective identity. That is precisely what has been lost in the era of personal democracy." In a mass of individuals, any one person is pretty much powerless. And it's very hard to rally a whole group when each individual can opt out and cut a private deal. Our current emphasis on the autonomy of individuals may be nothing more than the upshot of the old "divide and conquer" strategy.

Even apart from its theme, I found the frank discussion of so many political movements and changes quite informative. Time and again I found myself thinking, so that's what was "really" going down. Every few pages brought another "aha" reaction. I'm not familiar with this book's point of view. I seldom see comments so blunt and realistic that don't descend into cynicism. Separate from its theme of voter participation, this book could function as an introduction to the realpolitik of the last century.

I was surprised to learn that the progressive movement in the first part of the twentieth century in fact elevated government by rational experts over government by the common man. The progressive movement spurred the growth of our current government bureacracy. In the book's own words: "The new politics of policymaking attempts to open itself to all those who have ideas and expertise rather than to those who assert interest and preferences. Those admission requirements exclude the great mass of ordinary citizens."

There are critical reviews of many previous and current issues, including: devolution, vouchers, patronage, bureaucracy, procedural openness, redistricting, judicial activism, the Great Society, outsourcing, privatization, and the alignment between institutions and politics (how does the commonplace that the Pentagon is "Republican" make sense?). As an example, on devolution (or states rights, or block grants, or whatever you call it) the book says: "Devolution tends to divorce public policies from the organized groups that support them and leaves policies vulnerable to elimination, downsizing, outsourcing, and privatization. "

I expected this book to be at the center of significant controversies it had ignited. In support of its startlingly unusual theme it ranges very broadly and reflects deep scholarship, and it directly challenges the conventional wisdom. But I didn't find evidence of an academic debate, nor did I find evidence of a shakeup in practical political circles. What I did find is this book has quickly become the favored reading for a certain kind of college political science course.

Before concluding its last chapter "Does Anyone Need Citizens?" with the words "Who Cares?" the book passionately makes its case saying: "Without collective mobilization we become a nation of occupants. We will no doubt remain on speaking terms, and we may even argue with one another less frequently, but there will be fewer reasons for us to be interested in one another or to engage one another politically."

Important Message, A Strain to Read.......2003-05-30

The authors are substantively at the top of the heap in terms of making sense and documenting their observations. The book loses one star to poor decisions by the editors and publishers on dark paper, single spacing, small almost crowded type, and an over-all look and feel that makes this book annoying and difficult to read.

The authors discuss and document ten points in each of ten chapters:
1) The tyranny of the minorities has reached its ultimate peversion--single individuals, well-educated, well-off, get what they want, and the poor masses lose the power that came from groups with diverse backgrounds.
2) Citizenship has lost its meaning--taxation is automatic, and the US can be said to be back in a situation where the broad masses are experiencing "taxation without representation."
3) Elections now feature only the intensely loyal minority from each of the two major parties--the bulk of the voters have dropped out and elections are thus not representative of the wishes of the larger community.
4) Patronage has changed, with corporations rather than citizens getting to feed at the public trough, and the focus being on influencing policy after election, never mind who the people elected. The authors also do an excellent job of discussing polling and the manner in which it misrepresents the actual concerns and beliefs of the people.
5) Three chapters--one called "Disunited We Stand", a second called "From Masses to Mailing Lists, and a third called "Movements without Members" all make more or less the same point, but in different ways: political mobilization--people actually joining, doing, writing, demanding--are out, and instead we have micro groups, sometimes actually limited to the employed staff of an advocacy group, that raise funds, take stands, and get what they want, without ever having actually mobilized people to come together in a political manner.
6) A very thoughtful chapter covers the manner in which law suits and the judiciary have become a new battleground, a means of overturning laws and regulations made by the legislative and executive branches. While the authors do not go into the recent scams where a "nature conservation" non-profit sells prime environmental land to rich people below cost, and then accepts their tax-deductible contributions, they might also have explored how the law is being used to subvert the public interest, often with the help of the very "advocacy groups" that are nominally representing the public interest.
7) The authors do an excellent job of discussing how the out-sourcing of government functions to private enterprises undermines accountability and lead to severe abuse. Similarly, non-profits, including notional churches and other tax dodges, can enjoy enormous public subsidization in the way of tax breaks, while giving less than they should to the public treasury.
8) The author's end by asking "Does Anyone Need Citizens?" and the last two words in the book are "Who cares?" Today, the Administration's answer would clearly be "no", we don't need citizens. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the US public is both uninformed, and unengaged. Citizens have allowed themselves to be side-lined, and by this excellent account from the authors, should they choose to re-engage, they will have very hard work in front of them as they seek to overturn a half-century of deliberate ventures all seeking to reduce citizenship, increase bureaucracy, and reward corporate patrons of individual politicians who choose not to act in the public interest, but only their own.

How Politics Became Personalized.......2003-05-23

In the 1970s, feminists rallied to the phrase, "the personal is political." In Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public, Johns Hopkins University political scientists Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg propose the reverse is now true. In an age when a president can be selected by judicial decree rather than popular consent, politics has become personalized. Government no longer operates on behalf of citizens but instead caters to individual "customers" with services geared to the needs of special interests.

This contrasts to the government of the 19th and early 20th centuries, which relied on the active participation of the public. For decades after the nation's founding, there was no professional civil service. The federal government was staffed through the spoils system while many local jurisdictions used volunteers. Putting together large blocs of voters was the bedrock of political legitimacy. National turnout for presidential elections in the late 1800s, for example, averaged a whopping 80% of eligible voters compared to less than 50% today.

Voter apathy in the present is the product of the public's marginalization by our political leaders, Crenson and Ginsberg maintain. Quite simply, ruling elites don't need and don't want broad-based voter consensus in putting their agendas into action anymore. They now rely more heavily on lobbying and litigation instead. Negative advertising and other smear tactics of recent electoral campaigns are designed to discourage voting by members of the opposition, not rally the support of believers.

The roots of this dilemma date back more than 100 years. In an attempt to rescue government from cronyism and corruption, the Progressives created the civil service system (based on merit rather than patronage) and established regulatory agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve Board to oversee commerce and the economy. These moves were supposed to put government under the authority of politically neutral technicians who would act in the public interest rather than by party loyalty. Yet they had the perhaps unintended effect of disengaging the state from its democratic foundation. (If nothing else, old-time machine politics tied leaders directly to their support base, however venal the relationship.)

Further aiding the professionalization of the government bureaucracy were the Revenue Act of 1942 and the Current Tax Payment Act of 1943, which enabled government to expand without direct citizen participation. The first piece of legislation broadened the nation's tax base, doubling the number of eligible taxpayers. The second provided for withholding income tax payments in advance of year-end filing, providing for a more predictable, steady cash flow. Prior to their passage, government relied on revenues raised through various use taxes and debt issues, augmented by the voluntary support of primarily affluent individual taxpayers.

Mobilizing larger voter masses under the New Deal, in response to the economic crisis of the 1930s, also only went so far. Franklin Roosevelt courted blue-collar workers in the North, but he did not challenge the feudalist system in the South. Agricultural labor was exempted from minimum wage laws and New Deal management was delegated to the state level (allowing public funds to be kept away from blacks) to appease the landed aristocracy of the former Confederacy.

When Great Society liberals sought to expand the New Deal coalition by embracing civil rights, the stage was set for the "New Politics" of today. Mobilizing the black vote pushed many Southerners, including Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, out of the Democratic Party and alienated northern working-class whites. This broke up the left's constituency and shifted the electorate rightward.

In the place of high citizen involvement, New Politics introduced what Crensen and Ginsberg call "interest-group democracy." Public interest law firms, nonprofit think tanks and other advocacy groups (funded by foundation grants, private contributions and government contracts) trade on insider information and peddle influence within the Beltway on behalf of a plethora of constituencies, which may or may not exist in the national body politic. The judiciary and executive branches of government are the primary battlegrounds of these much less public skirmishes. And within the more discreet corridors of power, partisan politics are still being waged.

The government bureaucracy tends to be staffed ideologically according to function. Departments devoted to social welfare (health, education, housing, urban development, the environment, etc.) tend to attract career employees with more liberal leanings. Departments involved with commerce, security, and the military tend to attract more conservative ones. Recent efforts to reduce "entitlements" and their governmental infrastructures have had the bonus effect of solidifying power for conservatives within the government bureaucracy, Crensen and Ginsberg claim.

Another area where partisanship is still at play is in judicial and executive appointments. With more and more policy decisions being made through litigation and lobbying, controlling judges, department heads, regulators, etc. has become all the more important. Approving nominees for these positions has broad implications on the direction of government for a public that for all intents and purposes is being left out of the loop. In the case of the Federal judicial bench, for example, this includes the power to set case law and influence legal decisions for years to come.

What's to be done about this dysfunctional situation? Unfortunately, Crensen and Ginsberg don't give much cause for optimism. The withdrawal of the average citizen from politics cannot be easily reversed. "If citizens are to be roused from apathy to action," they write in the conclusion, "someone in a position to arouse them must have an interest in doing so." But there isn't really anyone in power today whose interests would be served by doing that. The best they can offer is to lift the guilt laid on by moralists that the decline of mass democracy is simply the result of the couch-potato solipsism the nation has supposedly slipped into during the age of Beavis and Butthead.

Book Description

Beginning in 1983, the Mexican government implemented one of the most extensive programs of market-oriented reform in the developing world. Downsizing the State examines a key element of this reform program: the privatization of public firms.

After providing a broad overview of the growth and decline of public ownership in Mexico, Dag MacLeod analyzes the process of privatization in three key industries—aviation, telecommunications, and railroads. Drawing upon interviews with government officials, business executives, and labor leaders as well data from government archives and corporate documents, MacLeod highlights the difficulties of linking market reforms to improved public welfare. Privatization failed to live up to its promise of raising living standards or decentralizing the economy. Indeed, privatization actually increased the concentration of wealth in Mexico while redirecting the economy toward foreign markets.

These findings contribute to theoretical debates regarding state autonomy and the embeddedness of economic action. MacLeod calls into question the autonomy of the Mexican state in its privatization program. And, while accepting the basic premises of economic sociology, he shows that the creation of markets where public firms once dominated has involved both the destruction of social relations and the construction of new relations and institutions to regulate the market.

Downsizing the State is a theoretically innovative account of how actors and institutions may construct capitalist markets so that they actually resemble the asocial ideal of neoclassical economics: facilitating exchange among actors while denying the obligations and commitments that attach to other types of social relations.

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Corporate downsizing: public perception versus reality

Downsizing in America: Reality, Causes, And Consequences
William J. Baumol , Alan S. Blinder , and Edward N. Wolff
Manufacturer: Russell Sage Foundation Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works--and How It's Transforming the American Economy

ASIN: 0871541386

Book Description

In the 1980s and early 1990s, a substantial number of U.S. companies announced major restructuring and downsizing. But we don't know exactly what changes in the U.S. and global economy triggered this phenomenon. Little research has been done on the underlying causes of downsizing. Did companies actually reduce the size of their workforces, or did they simply change the composition of their workforces by firing some kinds of workers and hiring others? Downsizing in America, one of the most comprehensive analyses of the subject to date, confronts all these questions, exploring three main issues: the extent to which firms actually downsized, the factors that triggered changes in firm size, and the consequences of downsizing.

The authors show that much of the conventional wisdom regarding the spate of downsizing in the 1980s and 1990s is inaccurate. Nearly half of the large firms that announced major layoffs subsequently increased their workforce by more than 10 percent within 2 or 3 years. The only arena in which downsizing predominated appears to be the manufacturing sector—less than 20 percent of the U.S. workforce.

Downsizing in America offers a range of compelling hypotheses to account for the adoption of downsizing as an accepted business practice. In the short run, many companies experiencing difficulties due to decreased sales, cash flow problems, or declining securities prices reduced their workforces temporarily, expanding them again when business conditions improved. The most significant trigger leading to long-term downsizing was the rapid change in technology. Companies rid themselves of their least skilled workers and subsequently hired employees who were better prepared to work with new technology, which in some sectors reduced the size of firm at which production is most efficient.

Baumol, Blinder, and Wolff also reveal what they call the dirty little secret of downsizing: it is profitable in part because it holds down wages. Downsizing in America shows that reducing employee rolls increased profits, since downsizing firms spent less money on wages relative to output, but it did not increase productivity. Nor did unions impede downsizing. The authors show that unionized industries were actually more likely to downsize in order to eliminate expensive union labor. In sum, downsizing transferred income from labor to capital—from workers to owners.

Downsizing in America combines an investigation of the underlying realities and causes of workforce reduction with an insightful analysis of the consequent shift in the balance of power between management and labor, to provide us with a deeper understanding of one of the major economic shifts of recent times—one with far-reaching implications for all American workers.

Customer Reviews:

Corporate downsizing: public perception versus reality.......2004-02-22

Headlines in the last decade of the twentieth century contained a steady drumbeat of corporate downsizing announcements. Now three professors of economics have used money from the Russell Sage Foundation to examine the record to see what actually happened to American firms during those stressful years. They wanted to know whether public perceptions matched reality.

The limited funds placed significant constraints on the resources available to the researchers. The value of their work depends heavily on their skill and judgement in using publicly available statistics and discrete private data bases to reveal more than at first sight evident. The result is a model of econometric technique.

The first conclusion is that newspaper media tended to favor the dramatic figures from large, well-known manufacturers. Manufacturing in America has been in long-term decline since 1967 and manufacturers have steadily shed jobs. So far, perception matches reality. However, agriculture and manufacturing only provide employment for 15% of the population, so this segment is not a good proxy for the entire economy.

What happened in the Service Sector that employed the other 85% of the population? Unfortunately, we can only see gross trends, because the government doesn't collect steady, detailed statistics on this segment. The researchers were forced to use some indirect techniques to tease out meaning from what was available.

"Downsizing", it turns out, is corporate-speak for upsizing. Firms laid off one set of workers - disproportionately less-educated, older, female or parents of young children - and hired on another set, by implication younger, male and single. Was the resulting workforce more productive? No, there was no change in employee productivity. Moreover, non-managerial employees bore the brunt of the layoffs, so that claims to be ridding the company of "fat" actually increased the management-to-staff ratio.

Did investors reward companies for their action? Perception says that downsizing is followed by an increase in the stock price. The reality is that stock prices remain steady or decline after downsizing announcements.

So what were the benefits of downsizing? The authors come to a surprising, but authoritative conclusion. Downsizing announcements force down staff wages so that the firm retains more profit. Simple really, isn't it?

Book Description

This study of CAMI Automotive, a unionized joint venture between General Motors and Suzuki, is the most comprehensive ever undertaken of a lean production plant. James Rinehart, Christopher Huxley, and David Robertson address a topic that has inspired fierce debate in industrial relations, sociology, labor studies, and human resource management. Heralded as a model of lean production when it opened in 1989, CAMI promised workers something different from traditional plants--a humane environment, empowerment, and cooperative labor-management relations. However, the enthusiasm workers felt during the orientation and early phases of production steadily declined, as did their involvement in participatory activities. Workers came to describe CAMI as "just another car factory." Union challenges and shopfloor resistance to key elements of the lean system grew, capped by a five-week strike in 1992. The authors attribute workers' disillusionment to lean production itself rather than to North American managers' inadequate implementation.

Customer Reviews:

Union Entitlement vs Earning a Living.......1999-11-25

Prejudiced and unobjective account of the CAMI joint venture in Ontario. The authors, (two sociology professors and a union bureaucrat) are guilty of sloppy research and pro-union bias. Their much emphasized "unlimited access to the shop floor" was apparently wasted. This book is a golden example of a wasted opportunity. Still, it serves as an example of why transplants usually stay non-union.

Clear impact study of newer production management technics.......1998-12-02

Excellent book, very informative and readable consideration of CAMI Automotive and the implementation of "Japanese" style management. Clearly considers the worker responses over several years while describing the basics of the management approaches used. This is a a very solid and informative work.

The Defense Revolution: Intelligent Downsizing of America's Military

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The Defense Revolution: Intelligent Downsizing of America's Military
Kenneth L. Adelman , and Norman R. Augustine
Manufacturer: ICS Press
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ASIN: 1558150757

Disconnected: How Six People From AT&T Discovered the New Meaning of Work in a Downsized Corporate America

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A moving, sensitive, and compelling set of portraits...

Disconnected: How Six People From AT&T Discovered the New Meaning of Work in a Downsized Corporate America
Barbara Rudolph
Manufacturer: Free Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0684842661

Amazon.com

If there was ever a company that epitomized corporate downsizing, it's AT&T. Between 1984 and 1995, the company managed to slash some 120,000 jobs, and in 1996, in a bit of bravado and posturing for Wall Street, it announced the elimination of another 40,000 jobs (the final number, however, was considerably less). In Disconnected, author Barbara Rudolph looks at the lives of six white-collar workers--a telephone operator, engineer, salesperson, business strategist, corporate planner, and an assistant staff planner--who in AT&T's terms were "accepted for the package," "involuntarily separated," or in real terms, were fired.

Rudolph argues that the American workplace has undergone a profound and lasting change. In the '50s and '60s job security was part of the social contract in a "world of three television networks and one phone company, a single computer giant, and a small clique of regulated airlines." These days, that contract has all but disappeared in the wake of much more fluid and competitive global business environment. She writes:

"Like many of their peers, these six came to see the organization as a kind of family. If they did not perceive it as benevolent, they assumed that it was more or less benign. They imbued it, too, with a rationality and coherence that did not actually exist. They lost sight of the fact that a company is not a purposeful entity but merely a set of shifting alliances that mix people and power, ego and intellect."

At the heart of Disconnected is the story of how these six workers moved beyond the initial insecurity and pain of their joblessness to redefine themselves, find happiness, and at least for five of the six, move on to new and productive careers. Disconnected is a useful primer to the inevitable career changes that most of us will have to undergo as the workplace lurches forward into the new millennium. --Harry C. Edwards

Book Description

The economy is booming, yet healthy, profitable companies continue to lay off hundreds of thousands of employees and downsizing has become a permanent part of the landscape of corporate America. In Disconnected, acclaimed journalist Barbara Rudolph puts a human face on this new economic reality, through intimate portraits of six people whose lives were irrevocably changed when they lost their jobs at AT&T.

When they were cut loose from the corporate fold at AT&T -- an American icon that once promised lifetime job security and claimed the unquestioning allegiance of its employees -- these six people made a difficult transition from the old world of work to the new one. Rudolph takes us inside the lives of Maggie, a feisty telephone operator whose job was made obsolete by technology; Tom, a brilliant executive who survived unscathed through childhood polio and the Vietnam War, but never fulfilled his early promise; Vince, a soft-spoken manager, son of the first black general counsel at GM, who found strength in his father's legacy; Barbara, a self-sufficient salesperson who learned to move on; Larry, a blunt-speaking, rumpled-looking Bell Labs engineer, who was bolstered by early fame; and Kyle, a strategist who discovered how to land on his feet and look out for himself.

These are moving tales of resilience and triumph, terror and redemption. With empathy and a reporter's instinct for telling detail, Rudolph eloquently portrays the full impact of downsizing on her individual subjects and their families. Each struggled to reclaim a sense of self in the wake of this loss. Each emerged with radically different notions of loyalty, commitment, and personal responsibility.

Many of us have made this journey; many others will. Through these six lives, Rudolph sheds new light on the connection between work and identity, between who we are and what we do. What does it mean today to be a company man or woman in an environment defined by bald individualism and emotional detachment? And most important, how do we find security and meaning in the unmapped territory of the new world of work? The people who survive share something precious, Rudolph concludes: "They have come to comprehend their value, independent of their corporate identity. They have claimed their personal dignity."

Customer Reviews:

A moving, sensitive, and compelling set of portraits..........1998-09-04

Barbara Rudolph has accomplished a very difficult task: she has completely humanized the relationships between people and their work, and has gotten six long-term, loyal employees of AT&T who were downsized (fired, dismissed) after many years of service to reveal their thoughts, feelings, fears and triumphs in the aftermath of that blow to their self-image, their self-esteem and their security. It is less an attack on America's corporate culture than it is a tribute to the essence of the people who are the real shapers of our economy and our culture. Rudolph, who according to the bio on the book,has been a business writer for major publications, obviously understands the corporate culture and sets her human stories in a very professionally rendered account of the changing nature of employment and of the corporation as family, then she introduces her subjects to fill in the important aspects of our attitudes toward work and the identities we shape through it. It's wonderful. And, I was first attracted ot the book by the back-cover blurbs from Richard Sennett and Earl Shorris, whose recommendations are once again justified.

Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public.(Book Review): An article from: Independent Review

Average customer rating:

Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public.(Book Review): An article from: Independent Review
Robert Heineman
Manufacturer: Independent Institute
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

General | Politics | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Independent Review, published by Independent Institute on June 22, 2004. The length of the article is 1026 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public.(Book Review)
Author: Robert Heineman
Publication: Independent Review (Refereed)
Date: June 22, 2004
Publisher: Independent Institute
Volume: 9 Issue: 1 Page: 141(3)

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale

Downsizing in America: Reality, Causes, and Consequences

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Downsizing in America: Reality, Causes, and Consequences
William J. Baumol & Others
Manufacturer: Russell Sage Foundation Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000VWK9VW

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