•  Book Review: Gig/100 Jobs •  Work & Health

White-Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and Its Rewards in Corporate America
By Jill Andresky Fraser
W.W. Norton &Co.
352 pp $26.95

I was a bit skeptical when I first saw the title of this book. In my three and a half years at a business magazine covering the late great Internet economy, my working conditions were more sweat lodge than sweatshop. Sure, we worked the insane hours that have become the norm for cubicle dwellers from Boston to Bakersfield. But at least some of the stress was alleviated by the free food, massages, gym memberships, subsidized childcare, and soaring salaries. And let's not forget those stock options, the currency of the fin-de-siècle "New Economy."

Alas, when the boom went bust, so did the perks. Journalist Jill Andresky Fraser makes a persuasive case that the lush life of the dot-com era was, if anything, an aberration in the white-collar experience, a brief interlude in a 20-year downward spiral for America's corporate middle class. Her timing is right on the mark -- a few years ago this book probably would have been laughed off as "so old economy." But not these days. Just look at once-mighty giants like Enron Corp., the Texas energy-trading firm whose collapse left its workers saddled with retirement funds loaded with now-worthless company stock.

Fraser, an editor at Inc. magazine, spent four years interviewing dozens of middle-management workers -- from Wall Street bond traders to Silicon Valley engineers -- across the country. Despite a decade of unprecedented economic prosperity, Fraser finds, these professionals are working harder and longer for less pay and fewer benefits. They are also under the constant threat of being laid off or replaced by a growing corporate underclass of contract workers. "The new corporate era has depended in large part upon tighter and tighter cost controls, layoffs, efficiency-driven mergers, and endless workplace cutbacks," she writes.

We meet people like "Evelyn," (names have been changed to protect the employed), a banking industry veteran who found herself "downsized" out of a career at age 50. Evelyn had risen from an administrative assistant to a hard-charging vice president at a large bank by dint of hard work and incessant travel. "I was a person who loved my job. I loved it," she told Fraser. "I've spent the night on a bench in O'Hare Airport. I got hung up in Oklahoma City when the air traffic controller strike happened. For three days, I couldn't get home. Not once did I ever dislike my job." Then merger mania began to roil the banking industry. She survived several waves of consolidation in the 1990s but eventually lost her job when her department was eliminated. "The final two years, I hated my job. Couldn't stand to be in the office," she said. Today, Evelyn is trying to start a new career -- running a dry-cleaning operation.

An entire book of such sad stories would be an exceedingly depressing read. But fortunately Fraser analyzes her subjects' individual experiences in light of research documenting growing workloads accompanied by shrinking pensions, vacations, and health care benefits. (For instance, despite the vaunted economic boom in the last decade, male white-collar workers in 1997 earned only 6 cents an hour more than they did in 1973, adjusting for inflation. And wages for men who were new college graduates actually fell 6.5 percent between 1989 and 1997.) More important, she places those personal stories and statistics in a historical context by addressing an obvious if difficult question: If times were so damn good, why did some of the best-educated, best-trained workers have it so bad?

Fraser pinpoints the golden age of corporate life, such as it was, to the post-World War II era. Wartime wage freezes ended and companies began to offer health insurance, pensions, and paid vacations to attract employees. It was a 9-to-5 world, the era of the man in the gray flannel suit, marked by a corporate commitment to long-term employment born of the Great Depression. But it was goodbye to all of that by the late 1970s. Stagflation, declining productivity, and the rise of global competition from Japan and Europe triggered an economic crisis that opened the door to the corporate raiders of the 1980s. To pay off the tremendous debt that financed these conquests, takeover artists often broke up their targets, selling off pieces of companies and throwing white-collar workers on the street. Employees who survived found their benefits cut and job stress on the rise as the new owners sought to pay off debt and increase profitability.

The prosperity of the 1990s did little to ease those pressures, according to Fraser. Corporate America was in thrall to Wall Street's cargo cult of ever-rising stock prices and profit margins. When CEOs couldn't deliver the goods, they turned to human sacrifice -- firing their employees to appease the great gods of The Street. As a business editor during the big boom, I witnessed this reflexive ritual time and time again. A company would accompany a report of quarterly earnings they considered disappointing with an announcement that thousands of employees were being laid off to bolster the bottom line. The result: White-collar workers struggled more than ever to keep their jobs even as the unemployment rate plunged to its lowest level in nearly 40 years.

Fraser uses computer chipmaker Intel Corp. as a case study in how some companies maintain a life-during-wartime culture even as profits skyrocket. At Intel, an icon of the Silicon Valley-centered new economy, employees were "ranked and rated" on a bell curve. If workers' performance fell on the wrong side of the curve, their days were numbered. This allowed Intel to continually shed employees -- and keep costs down -- while ratcheting up pressure on survivors to work even harder.

No wonder this obsession with work is erasing the boundaries between office and home, intruding on the little time that remains for personal pursuits. Consider this disquieting glimpse of family life witnessed by Fraser herself: It's a summer afternoon and a woman takes her young daughters on a pedal-boat ride around a Long Island pond, all the while talking to her office on her cell phone. Then there's the newlywed who spends his honeymoon writing a report, and the single father who comes home, tucks his children into bed, and then returns to his Silicon Valley office to work until 1 am.

This never-stop-work ethic has filtered down to the comic strips. In a "Cathy" cartoon, her boss Mr. Pinkley asks Cathy to assemble the office staff for a meeting. "Of course, Mr. Pinkley," Cathy replies. "Janet and Mark are out, but accessible by cell... Karen can conference via Webcam from her laptop... Fred has wireless Web from his handheld."

"Cathy" hit the nail on the head: Technology is a prime culprit in corporations' hostile takeover of employees' personal lives. Cell phones, e-mail, and the Internet have spawned the never-ending workday. Your boss, clients, and colleagues can reach you anytime, anywhere -- and they will. Laptop computers and featherweight cell phones mean your office is wherever you are. There's no respite from work, even at 30,000 feet. These days you can send and receive e-mail while flying home from a business trip. And is it any surprise that people take their laptops on vacation, knowing that if they don't check their e-mail there will be hundreds, if not thousands, of messages waiting to be plowed through upon their return?

This state of being hardwired into the workplace can create withdrawal symptoms for those who try to preserve their personal lives by shutting off their machines. I distinctly remember the anxiety I felt when before one holiday my wife insisted the laptop and cell phone be left behind. "What if a big story breaks?" I protested. "What if my editor needs to get hold of me? What about all those e-mails piling up?" The laptop stayed home and my career survived.

Fraser ends the book with some ideas for reforming the white-collar sweatshop. Some of her suggestions -- such as shorter work weeks mandated by the company and improved health and pension plans -- seem pie-in-the sky. As long as a company's stock price and quarterly earnings remain the paramount gauge of its success, bottom line-obsessed CEOs are unlikely to undertake any change that would offend Wall Street sensibilities.

More realistic may be Fraser's hopes that white-collar workers themselves will pressure corporations to adopt more humane policies. She points to IBM employees who organized over the Internet to pressure Big Blue to change a pension policy that would have cost older workers thousands of retirement dollars. Fraser also cites nascent white-collar union drives among technology employees and physicians. Using the Internet as a communications and organizing tool, the middle-management masses could pressure the giant pension funds, which have immense influence over corporate America, to push for workplace reform, she says.

That's all well and good. But the paucity of such efforts points to a significant factor in the white-collar sweatshop phenomenon that receives rather scant attention in this book: the complicity of these workers in their office oppression. As high a toll as the white-collar world may exact, millions of educated people still aspire to such jobs, coveting the upper-middle-class comforts such positions can bring. Until these individuals come to believe that the psychic costs of obtaining that big house and expensive car exceeds the perceived benefits, don't expect to see the suit-and-tie set take to the streets.

White-collar workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your golden handcuffs.

-- Todd Woody is a former senior editor at The Industry Standard whose work has appeared in The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Columbia Journalism Review, and other publications.

First published January 24, 2002
Last updated March 11, 2008
Copyright © 2002 Consumer Health Interactive

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