It became clear that a gap has grown between how Americans feel about their daily work and how they feel about the economy as a whole. People feel good about their own jobs -- but they believe that the rest of U.S. workers are about to lose theirs.
Why?
* * *
5. I'm okay. You're really screwed.
The simplest explanation may have to do with emphasis. Don Clifton, chairman of the Gallup Organization, reconciles the perception-reality mismatch this way: "We ought to feel good about where we are, but there's just so much opportunity to manage better. Though 75% said their work doesn't cause them to behave poorly with their families, 23% said it does. That's a lot of people."
Skeptics that we journalists are, we took a similar angle when we first got what seemed to us surprisingly positive results. Sure, only 9% of the adult working population scored their work satisfaction at a level 1 or 2 on the five-point scale -- but that's still somewhere between 9 million and 11 million unhappy people in our workforce on any given day. Several million unsatisfied people can make some serious noise and have a sobering effect on the public's mood about the state of the economy.
The fact remains, however, that when asked specifically about their workplaces and their own jobs, the vast majority of the working adult population in the United States is remarkably satisfied. So why do Americans appear to believe the worst about the circumstances of their neighbors, even though their own work lives are fine?
Some possible explanations:
Bad news sells. Perhaps we have a dim view of the country's prospects because, as Robert J. Samuelson observes in The Good Life and Its Discontents: The American Dream in the Age of Entitlement, 1945Ñ1995 (Times Books/Random House, 1995), "the nature of the modern press gives the worst side of us much more exposure and respectability than ever before."
We were reminded of just how much you can twist positive news by a front-page blurb in the "Work Week" column of the January 16 Wall Street Journal, soon after the publication of Samuelson's book last year. Under the boldfaced heading "Does Money Buy Happiness?" the Journal writes: "Samuelson . . . quotes a survey showing that 6% of people making $75,000 or more describe themselves as 'not too happy." It appears we're supposed to be alarmed that so many people making that kind of money are unhappy. But what about the 45% making more than $75,000 who said that they were very happy? Or the other 49% who said that they were pretty happy? Samuelson reports it all in his book. He also cites another survey in which 80% of us say that we're satisfied with our lives. Eighty percent! Ninety-four percent of those making $75,000 or more are happy! Yet the Journal turned the unhappy 6% into news. Funny? Yes. Unusual? No.
As recently as last fall, the Hay Group, a management-consulting firm with headquarters in Philadelphia, reported findings from its 1995Ñ1996 employee-attitudes study suggesting that despite downsizing, workers are generally more upbeat about their employers than they were five years ago. According to the Hay report, overall job satisfaction was up from earlier surveys, and pride in one's company was high across all job levels. The news of the Hay study seems to have fallen on deaf ears when it came to press coverage. Few media outlets picked up the findings. Good news just doesn't sell.
Bad news gets promoted even by the people making it . Consider the daily doses of news on massive corporate layoffs. While companies are laying off workers regularly, the job losses are more than offset by new jobs in the same industries. Why don't we hear about that? One, the media don't report it much -- and when they do, they bury the good news deep in the story. Twenty-one paragraphs into a cover feature headlined "Economic Anxiety" in the March 11 Business Week is this information: "During the past two years, the seven regional telephone companies have slashed some 125,000 jobs, on top of the 40,000 latest cuts announced at AT&T. Nevertheless, the industry's total employment rose by 91,000 during the period, as companies beefed up employment in cellular and other fast-growing businesses."
Sometimes the new jobs are added by the same companies that announce the cuts. Last October, when AT&T announced it would eliminate 8,500 people from its personal-computer division, it also was hiring hundreds in its new consulting and systems-integration divisions. But we hear about the fires, not the hires. Corporate America has learned that a good thing happens when you broadcast a sense of prudent cost management and rigorous-if-ruthless leanness: your stock price goes up. So, got some jobs to cut? Call a press conference.
The halo effect. Isn't it curious that according to surveys, most Americans hold gloomy views about the economy at large while at the same time they've told us that as individuals they're doing just fine in their own workplaces? Curious, perhaps. But not unusual. In fact, the I'm-okay-but-nothing-else-is worldview is a predictable pattern -- not just in surveys on the economy but also in surveys on religion, public schools, and almost every aspect of life that's been the subject of a poll.
