Thursday, July 17, 1997

Downsizing breeds cynicism among workers

By HOMER BRICKEY / Toledo Blade

I know a man who never fails to read the newspaper on Sundays. Unlike most readers, however, he turns first to the classified advertising section and carefully scans the help-wanted ads.

He is not exactly looking for a job. He's looking for his job. He wants to make sure he isn't out of a job the next week.

Call him paranoid if you will, but he has been merged out, downsized out, and "right-sized" out of jobs before.

He's not alone. Once upon a time, workers were laid off only when a company was in financial trouble or when the economy went south. But nowadays, downsizing has become a permanent culture in some companies.

There is nothing funny about downsizing, but even the comic strips have taken advantage of the grim humor that can result.

For some time, Dilbert has found humor in dehumanized corporate machinations, and now Cathy (in the strip of the same name) has been downsized into a part-time, work-at-home, free-lance job.

It's likely that downsizing will hit the movies sometime soon. Already, a book of fiction that promises to be a best-seller, "The Ax," by Donald E. Westlake (Mysterious Press/Warner Books), explores the pathological depression and mania that can result from downsizing.

The book involves a 51-year-old man, Burke Devore, who is axed from Halcyon Mills, where he had been a paper-products manager for years. He proceeds to do some "axing" of his own - by eliminating competing job candidates for one of the few remaining positions for which he is qualified at another large company. He uses a pistol instead of a literal ax, but the effect is the same.

Fiction, surely.

But we see middle-class people fall off the deep end all the time. The sudden, unexpected end of a career can wreak all sorts of financial, marital, and mental havoc.

For years, sociologists and labor analysts have predicted that workers of the future will have not just one career but five, six, or seven careers - as they adjust to changing technology and economies.

The ways to job security are few, it seems: taking advantage of every opportunity to learn new skills, getting more education, and thinking entrepreneurially.

Education is rapidly becoming a dividing line between the haves and have-nots. A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Earnings, Education and Experience, points out that, although the earnings differential between college and high school graduates has been exaggerated in some past studies, it is still large.

By 1993, workers with bachelor's degrees averaged 52 per cent more income than did high school graduates (nearly double the difference shown three decades earlier), according to the study.

And those with some post-graduate study made 73 percent more than high school graduates did.

Education by itself is not job security, but the earnings difference offers more of a pad to fall back on.

Entrepreneurship is not total security either. Far from it. About 3.5 million Americans start businesses every year (admittedly, many are sidelines or part-time ventures) - and most are doomed to fail.

Talk about downsizing! Those folks could be downsized right out of their life savings and into bankruptcy court.

But at least they have the satisfaction of knowing they did it to themselves instead of waiting for the corporate ax.

I know another man who isn't at all scared about downsizing. It has already happened to him several times, but he has rebounded and now takes the offensive.

He has obtained three or four new jobs in the last few years. His methodology is to work for a company just long enough to learn a new machine or a new skill and then look for a better-paying job doing the same thing - or, better, a job that allows him to leverage yet another skill.

He knows he won't be making $20 an hour anyway, so it's no problem. He's not losing any sleep - or wasting any loyalty.