The 1998 Inc./Gallup Survey: The State of the American Workforce

An examination of the results from the 1998 Inc./Gallup survey of American workers. Here's how average American workers feel about their jobs, management, compensation, and economic futures.

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The Inc./Gallup Survey

Does the average U.S. worker feel fairly paid? Badly managed? Worried about the future? Answers below

The secret of life is authority," Groucho Marx once explained. "If you can fake that, you've got it made." Actually, Groucho said "honesty," not "authority." But that was before the 1990s--before cable news channels, before demand for expertise so painfully outstripped supply, before it became the worst sin in public life to be caught without "a take." (As in, "What's your take on the aftereffects of NAFTA?" Or, "Olympic ice dance--got a take on that bloc judging?") In the '90s a thinking person responds with authority. Whether it's ersatz or not.

That epidemic of glib authority seemed to us especially worrisome back in 1995, when we launched our annual survey of U.S. workers. The country was heading toward a presidential election, and the politicians, the pundits, and the press--all interpreting for the average and apparently inarticulate citizen--were making "economic anxiety" a headline cliché. By the end of 1995, corporate layoffs had resulted in the loss of 440,000 jobs, and by March 1996, the New York Times had launched its seven-day-long, Pulitzer-chasing (but not -winning) screed on the plight of the beleaguered U.S. worker. Very authoritative stuff--even if by that juncture in the media's coverage of downsizing, the Times was just piling it on. The workplace, by all accounts, was filled with fear and anger.

Maybe so, we at Inc. thought at the time. Nevertheless, something troubled us: for all the authority with which the experts gave their take on how workers were feeling, no one seemed to have conscientiously questioned actual workers--so we decided we would. Hence the annual Inc./Gallup survey of Americans at work.

Then, as now, our idea was straightforward: we would ask workers to answer for themselves. How satisfied do you feel at work? Are you managed well or poorly? Is your pay fair? (Is your boss's?) How does work affect the rest of your life? And, finally, what do you expect of your economic future?

Simple questions, all. Not that they yielded simple answers. This poll, like most, doesn't serve up fully cooked conclusions even when it initially appears to. For instance, this year a whopping 83% of U.S. workers said stress had never caused them to miss a day on the job. But what does that mean? Is stress overrated as a modern workplace malady? Or could it be that stress has become such an accepted condition of employment that we've all just figured out how to cope with it? Then again, is it cause for alarm that one out of six workers had missed time because of stress? Or all of the above?

The point is, surveys don't result in unambiguous findings. At best they call into question the supposedly unassailable wisdom of experts, from the most cynical demagogues to the most well-intentioned analysts. That's certainly what our first Inc./Gallup survey did when we published it, in 1996. It showed that "economic anxiety" was a lie. And this year's survey reconfirms that. Once again, workers testify to widespread general satisfaction. Have global competition, technological change, and the careering velocity of the new economy placed the American worker under threat? Nope. At least not so that he or she has noticed.

Of course, it's no longer news to discover happy employees--not in a business climate flush with theoretical full employment and heaven's own stock market. But in its own--perhaps more modest--way, this year's survey (our third) remains as startling as the first.

For one thing, its results across the board are virtually unchanged from two years ago. Amid the most upbeat economic news in a generation, Americans feel about their work the same way they did when the news was almost uniformly bad.

Still more interesting, though, is the picture the survey begins to paint of the typical U.S. workplace--a workplace in which employees aren't just satisfied (as 72% said they were) but feel respected, counted on, communicated with, and cared for as people. It's a workplace that sounds more than enlightened; it sounds almost nurturing. Does that mean that 15 years of post-Tom Peters management science has achieved its aims? Or did we not need "management by walking around" in the first place?

Here's more of what we heard from workers in this year's Inc./Gallup survey:

The incredible lightness of being employed
As noted, employee satisfaction reigns. Back in 1995, when we asked workers to rate their level of job satisfaction on a five-point scale (5 meaning "extremely satisfied"), 71% of them answered with a 4 or a 5. This year 72% did--a statistically insignificant difference in the context of this survey. (See the note on how the survey was conducted, at the end of the story.) Compare those figures with separate survey results for other countries, as compiled in 1997 by International Survey Research, in Chicago. Asked how satisfied they were with their workplaces, 55% of workers in the United Kingdom responded favorably; in France, 56% did; and in Japan, only 44%.

Locating the source of the average U.S. worker's relative sense of fulfillment is impossible, but two other Inc./Gallup questions may offer clues. In the United States, 82% of workers said they had the opportunity to do what they do best every day. In Japan and Germany, by comparison, recent surveys yielded responses of 65% and 64%, respectively, to the same question. In the United States, 84% of workers claimed they had the opportunity to learn and grow on the job. In Germany, only 68% did.

However high the U.S. satisfaction numbers are, though, you might still question why they've remained unchanged over the course of three yearly surveys. Why, given an economy as robust as any in 24 years, isn't satisfaction rising?

Could it be because, in the new economy, even the good times come with a lot of turmoil? Whereas "job churn" may have been blown out of proportion in 1995, this year it's gone woefully underreported. Sure, unemployment rates are down to 4.6%, but downsizing is hotter than ever. In January alone, 72,193 jobs were cut, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the Chicago-based outplacement company that tracks such numbers. That's up from the 58,293 that were cut in December 1997, and far more than the 43,595 jobs that were cut in January 1997. Workers are still satisfied, yes. But in an environment in which job cuts are climbing, why should it come as a surprise that workers are no more satisfied than they were in 1995 or 1996?

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