SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA JOB MARKET : CHALLENGES OF THE WORKING LIFE : COMMITMENT : AN ERA OF NO JOB GUARANTEES

Tired at 44 of the turmoil that swirled around his job at Swift foods in Chicago--the takeovers, the turnover, the management upheaval--he picked up his family, returned to his native Los Angeles and accepted a job at a food distributor, planning to stay until retirement.

Less than six months later, with Christmas three weeks off, he was fired. No warning. No explanation. And no severance package.

He’d spent every penny of his family’s savings on the move. “I had to call my lender and tell them, ‘I can’t make my house payment,’ ” the UCLA graduate recalled. His daughter dropped out of dental school. His wife, who hadn’t worked in 20 years, took a part-time job. He borrowed $20,000 from a friend to stay afloat.

It was six months before he could find a comparable position. Six months of debts mounted up. Now, the family is getting back on its feet. But the sales executive’s faith in the corporate world won’t soon be restored.

“I’ve steeled my wife, my kids, myself--for if it happens once, it can happen again,” he said. “You keep the resume ready.”

His story is all too familiar to veterans of corporate life in the 1980s. After a decade of downsizings and mergers, givebacks and layoffs, the social contract between workers and employers is in tatters.

Where once average or better performance in a job with a large or medium-sized American company could virtually guarantee employment until retirement, for many all it now promises is insecurity and doubt.

Desperate to battle overseas competitors or to fend off unwanted suitors, companies have slashed their work forces ruthlessly. But in many cases, workers who remain after the bloodletting may lack the heart for a decisive fight.

Their commitment to institutions already loosened by the social upheavals of the 1960s and ‘70s, many survivors of corporate restructuring have rejected the notion that they owe their companies anything more than an honest day’s work.

Loyalty, they’ve learned, is for suckers.

“Even if they decide to be loyal and commit to the organization, they can’t have a guarantee the organization is going to be loyal to them,” said Brian S. Morgan, who studies worker attitudes for Hay Management Consultants in Philadelphia. “Even if management wants to be, it may be beyond the control of the current management in that organization.”

The landscape of the U.S. economy is littered with shattered bonds, broken promises and dashed expectations:

* Nearly half the companies surveyed by the American Management Assn. in mid-1987 had substantially slashed their work forces in the previous 18 months, and about one in five planned further cuts.

* Almost 11 million workers lost their jobs in plant closings or corporate downsizings in the five years before that, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Of the 5.1 million of those workers who had been in their jobs more than three years, 45% received no warning that their positions were to be eliminated.

A third still were unemployed at the time of the bureau’s survey in January, 1986. And more than half had to change occupations entirely in order to get back to work.

“We’re in a different era now,” said Judith Segal, a Los Angeles management consultant. “There is no job security.”

* Top executives show little commitment to their companies. More than 40% of senior executives have worked for four or more companies in the last 15 years, according to a survey published in July by the Harvard Business Review. Just under half of them made their most recent job change after three years or less in their previous post.

* Survey after survey finds rank-and-file workers’ loyalty diminishing as well. Only 38% of the 5,000 employees questioned last year by Wyatt Co., a benefits and compensation consulting firm, said they were committed to the company as “more than just a place to work.” Barely half would recommend their company to a job-seeking friend.

Other studies have found as many as 70% of all workers in agreement that loyalty between employers and employees is disappearing.

“There’s disenchantment with corporate life like we’ve never experienced before,” said William Morin, chairman and chief executive of Drake Beam Morin, an outplacement firm based in New York.

Some workers who feel misused and abandoned by their companies get even. Pilferage, sabotage and the passive resistance of poor performance all increase, experts say. So do grievances, discrimination complaints and wrongful termination lawsuits.

“The cynicism in the middle ranks of some companies is kind of scary,” said William Bridges, a consultant in Mill Valley, Calif., who works with companies undergoing major transitions.

Ron DeMarco, passed over repeatedly for promotions at Northrop’s Electronics division in Hawthorne and laid off recently after four years with the firm, figures that the company has earned his enmity.

In response to a complaint from the 53-year-old administrator, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled last month that DeMarco was subjected to age discrimination by Northrop. He still has a formal grievance pending against the defense contractor. He even organized a group of colleagues to document the performance of a young co-worker who, he says, gets undeservedly favorable treatment--a record he turned over to Air Force investigators.

“My attitude is kind of defensive all the time,” said DeMarco, explaining his rebellion. “You don’t know whether you’re doing a good job or whether you’re not doing a good job, because they don’t tell you. Being in the older bracket, you have to worry about whether all of a sudden they’re going to pick on you, or if you defend yourself whether they’re going to write you up.

“Then you know every six months there’s going to be a layoff,” he said. “It makes you very uneasy. You don’t know what to do, because you can’t plan your life.”

A Northrop spokesman, noting that many of DeMarco’s formal charges are pending, declined to comment.

Other workers--placing loyalty to their families or themselves above commitment to the company--are walking away from corporate life altogether.

According to Morin, 25% of managers and executives who lose their jobs are inclined to go into business for themselves, up from just 3% a decade ago.

Some are even choosing to quit for the chance to be their own bosses. Janice Grimes, for instance, left her job last year as personnel manager for Cost Plus Imports, the San Francisco-based retailer, to work part-time as a personnel consultant--both on her own and through Corporate Staff, a “rent-an-executive” temporary employment agency with offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Grimes, who wanted to spend more time with her two children, says she brings a higher level of commitment to her consulting projects than she sometimes did to her full-time job.

“As a consultant, we live on our reputation. When I’m at a client’s, I feel like I really always have to do my best,” she said. “While working at Cost Plus, not that I didn’t do my best, but as an employee, sometimes you let up a little bit, you can have a bad day.”

An ever larger share of part-time work, however, is involuntary, government studies say. Last year, 5.1 million Americans who wanted full-time jobs worked part-time for lack of better opportunities, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics--a group 52% larger than just eight years earlier.

These workers, disproportionately women and minorities, get few benefits and have little job security, according to a recent study by Sar A. Levitan and Elizabeth A. Conway, researchers at George Washington University Center for Social Policy Studies.

Employers enjoy the flexibility and lower labor costs such workers afford, the study says. But employees, it says, too often find themselves considered disposable, with neither a written nor an unspoken contract of loyalty binding them to their low-wage jobs.

Still other workers stay in the full-time corporate world but adopt a “me-first” attitude that defines co-workers as competitors and every job as nothing more than a steppingstone.

“Managers are now thinking like free agents,” Paul Hirsch, a University of Chicago business professor, writes in “Pack Your Own Parachute,” his recent book on surviving corporate turmoil.

“Like their counterparts in professional baseball, they are beginning to look out for themselves, find out how much they are worth, and consider offers from other teams,” Hirsch contends. “No longer willing to be pawns in a game of corporate chess, they have loosened their psychological ties to any company they may work for.”

Experts say a “free-agent” mind-set may be the only rational way for workers to respond to the shocks that have buffeted American companies over the past 10 years.

Yet the very competition for which those companies readied themselves by slicing back their work forces, these experts warn, will require a level of commitment the firms now may find hard to unleash in their wary and traumatized workers.

“The me-first attitude really makes it into a dog-eat-dog, who-can-I-trust-today situation, (which) really is one of the key causes of loss of productivity and loss of profitability,” said Segal, the Los Angeles consultant. “There’s a tremendous case of shortsightedness.”

The sales executive whose sudden firing was the first major failure of his adult life can attest to the human consequences of management’s short-term view. He knows that he isn’t as effective a worker as he was just a few months ago.

“I wake up in the middle of the night saying, ‘Jesus, did I do this? Have I done that? Am I doing the job?’ ” he said. “And I find there are times I’m not doing it, because I’m thinking too much or being too reticent and not confident.

“The lack of confidence shows through.”

Editor: Jon D. Markman News Editor: Linda Finestone Art Director: David Puckett EXECUTIVES SAY “SO LONG” TO LOYALTY

A survey by the Harvard Business Review of nearly 1,000 corporate executives underscores the extent of job-hopping in the upper ranks of American business.

More Than 40% Worked for 4 or More Companies in the Past 15 Years. . .

. . . Nearly Half Have Held 7 or More Jobs in the Past 15 Years. . .

. . . And Almost Half Held Their Previous Job for 3 Years or less.

Ready to Go

51% of top executives agreed with the statement: “I am much more willing now to consider a job change than I was 10 years ago.”

64% of top executives said they were “very likely” or “likely” to change companies again in the next 10 years.