Salon.com
The age of overwork
The author of "White-Collar Sweatshop" says that toiling in the new
economy is no way to live.
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By Katharine Mieszkowski
March 1, 2001 | There are the sweatshops that make khakis, and then there
are the sweatshops where the people who wear khakis work.
Jill Andresky Fraser, author of "White-Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration
of Work and Its Rewards in Corporate America," charges so-called
new-economy companies like America Online and Intel (and some old-line
stalwarts like IBM) with grinding their huge stock market gains out of
their employees' so-called lives.
And guess what? With the economy and stock market flagging, she contends,
it's likely to get worse. An editor for Inc. magazine and Bloomberg
Personal Finance, Fraser revolts against how our new 24/7 work habits are
ruining our lives.
It's hard to feel sympathy for the plight of people who sit in front of
computers, talk on the phone and send e-mail for a living. How bad are
these "sweatshops" really?
To me, what the sweatshop image conveys is very long hours of work, unfair
compensation, a lack of control over one's work life and a feeling of
tremendous insecurity. And I think that all of those characteristics are
very powerfully true in a lot of people's lives.
There are 25 million of us who are putting in more than 10 hours each day
at the office. And for many people that is the beginning and not the end of
their workday. They're the ones who are working during their commutes,
after they put their kids to bed at night, on weekends and while they're
vacationing. They feel that their jobs can never be done. The workloads
have gotten so enormous that they're inescapable.
Although we thought technology would make our work lives easier and more
creative, the real impact of our laptops, our Palm Pilots, our e-mail and
our cellphones is that we can't ever not work. There's no justification.
A lot of these people are not earning six-figure salaries. They're earning
$30,000, $40,000, $50,000, $60,000. For all of those people out there who
are living the 24/7 lifestyle because overwork seems so macho and romantic,
many more are doing this because they can't figure out a way out.
How has the stock market boom of the past few years contributed to making
our work lives worse?
During the '90s, many people explicitly believed that there couldn't be
anything wrong with this system because the stock market was so incredibly
strong. They bought into the idea that rising stock prices would more than
compensate them for a whole range of different job-related sacrifices and
tradeoffs, through stock options -- if you were lucky enough to have them
-- or through your stock portfolio or your 401K plan. Somehow you were
going to share in the goodies.
People made what they thought of as short-term sacrifices, which became
accepted as the way American business has to be in order to be competitive
in the global marketplace. And then we didn't have any choice anymore.
Weekend getaways are replacing two-week vacations and Fed Ex now delivers
on Sunday. How did we lose the idea of private time vs. work time?
As recently as the '70s, people really did believe that new technology
would help us all actually work less. We would put in fewer hours at the
office, maybe even fewer days each week. Conceivably, we could all retire
when we're 45 or take three-month summer vacations every year.
But in the '80s, when layoffs started happening, people were very willing
to work longer and harder. They accepted doing the jobs of two or three
people with the thought that we would get past this crisis, and yet again
things were going to get better for all of us. But that didn't really
happen because through the '90s, when times were really increasingly good,
whose health insurance didn't consistently get worse year after year after
year? For most of the '90s, salaries didn't keep up with inflation (until
the very end of the decade), even though companies were doing great for years.
Full article at www.salon.com
Louis Proyect
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