The crisis of worker confidence is as inescapable as the daily news -- and we expected the first annual Inc./Gallup survey to reflect it. Boy, were we surprised
1. Fear and loathing in the new economy
Exactly when did "economic anxiety" become the emotional bumper sticker for our coast-to-coast collective unconscious?
Was it when Pat Buchanan (remember him?) won New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation presidential primary, reminding rivals in both parties that the electorate really is mad as hell? Or was it later in March, when the New York Times saw fit to run seven straight days of page-one stories on the downsizing of America? Or was it all the way back in 1993, when employment-for-life apostle IBM announced its first-ever five-digit layoff?
By now in any case, the supposed crisis of worker confidence is as inescapable as the daily news -- and we expected the first annual Inc./Gallup survey on work and the American workplace to reflect it.
In headlines that glare at us every waking moment of every working day, we are told that corporate downsizings, mergers, and other belt-tightening measures leave us hemorrhaging jobs. Politicians from both the left (Edward Kennedy) and the center (Bill Bradley) express concern as eagerly as Buchanan did from the right. Bradley, the would-be third-party moderate, writes, "Economic anxiety eats away at people who work in America."
The statistics seem bad enough -- on average, 37,000 jobs were cut every month in 1995 -- but perhaps the more stinging signs of unease are anecdotal and very close to home.
For instance, my own children -- though successful grad schoolÑeducated teachers -- wrestle with the need to work other jobs and train for other careers to feel secure. Both realize that their working lives will be a jigsaw puzzle of jobs, projects, and skills-gathering expeditions. Both, though fulfilled by their work, are exhausted and daunted by the effort of keeping the puzzle together.
Who hasn't heard similar testimony? "Everyone is a contingent worker," observes William Bridges, author of JobShift: How to Prosper in a Workplace Without Jobs (Addison-Wesley, 1994). We will come to see our times, he says, as the great dejobbing of America, leading to a day when all jobs come and go according to the changing needs of a company and its customers -- a fine and flexible day indeed for those companies and customers, but a fearful one for employees on a quest for career stability and some sense of control over the course of their lives. The unknown is a breeding ground for free-floating anxiety.
And out of that anxiety comes the brand-new conventional wisdom that the American dream -- the dream that living standards will forever rise, that we'll do better than our parents, and that our children's lives will be better than ours -- is ailing.
Or dead.
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2. Who's to blame? Part 1
Although the news accounts of our economic unease are broad and sweeping, they are quite specific about the root of our troubles. They lay blame squarely on the shoulders of greedy, heartless, soulless business. "Is the American Worker Getting Shafted?" asks the January 22 cover headline of U.S. News & World Report. The implied answer is all too clear: yes. The implied culprit? Business.
The theme is pounded on repeatedly not just by journalists but by policymakers of every stripe at every level. Chief among them is Robert Reich, President Clinton's labor secretary, who passionately proclaims that the implicit social compact between employer and employee, which used to guarantee workers' job security, "has come undone" and should be put right. Legislation has been filed. Theories of "new corporate citizenship" have been advanced.
It's not hard to understand why Reich's sentiments are widely shared. Given the hundreds of thousands of layoffs over the past several years, the argument goes, business must be failing us. And there is plenty of corroborating evidence that the public in fact sees our economic future as relatively bleak. The upshot? Whatever societal changes we face and whatever forces are producing them, business is simply not pulling its weight to help us through. Business -- we keep being told -- is harming America.
But do workers agree? They may be troubled, but do they think business is to blame? In the flood of coverage on economic insecurity, worker unease, and "the anxious class," we noticed an alarming absence of information about how workers see their own jobs and workplaces. Not how they see the future or the state of the economy overall -- many surveys have described diminished expectations or wounded hopes -- but how they assess their own situations. No one has been asking working Americans -- about 118 million of us -- how we are doing on the job and what we think of our employers.
So we at Inc. did just that. In partnership with the Gallup Organization, we surveyed Americans nationwide to ask questions like these: Are you worried about losing your job? Does the stress of work cause you to behave badly with your family? Does your management do what's necessary to make your company a great place to work?
The survey was conducted in November 1995. We asked randomly selected working adults throughout the United States to agree or disagree with 34 statements about their jobs, their workplaces, and their job security.
The results were nothing like what we expected.
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3. What American workers really think
We expected the same answers we bet you would: hard times on the job, rough handling by employers, fears about the future. Try this test: Ask folks at your next neighborhood barbecue to predict the responses to the national survey. What percentage of Americans do they think are worried about losing their jobs? Maybe 50%? More? What percentage do they think feel fairly paid? Say, 25%? And how many people do they think would say that management does whatever's necessary to make their company a great place to work? Hmmm, 10%? On a good day.
