Business Fails to Reach ‘the Disengaged’

In San Francisco, Mayor Art Agnos has removed the 350 homeless from the plaza near City Hall. As a candidate, he had promised not to act until the city built alternative shelter, but in July, he yielded to rising pressure to clear the streets anyway.

In Washington, some members of Congress have introduced legislation that would lay the burden of S&L; losses on the states where they occurred. Another bill would make the responsible officers of the failed S&Ls; pay down the final cost with their personal property.

These examples point toward a developing feeling that people should solve their own problems and also toward an underlying concern over government’s inability to handle society’s problems. Leaders and institutions, which until recently showed signs of a renewed reform instinct, have yielded to a new guard-your-own attitude. In short, leaders, voters and consumers have started to disengage from the social whole.

Although this attitude has just recently become obvious, it has already affected the workplace. Changing attitudes about work, or more specifically, the way in which workers perceive their jobs, could affect efforts to raise productivity. Consider these specific observations:

* Twenty-eight percent of new hires leave their jobs within one year.

* Fifty-seven percent of first-year employees are not “highly committed” to their companies.

* In 1979, 50% of the full-time employees participated in a company-financed pension plan. Rather than rising during the expanding economy of the 1980s, the figure declined , reaching 46% in 1988.

* Symbolic of the gap between employer and employee, some of Nordstrom’s famed service-oriented work force filed suit against the company for unpaid work--and won.

Workers have disengaged from their jobs, insisting that “I don’t care” because they have apparently developed a new attitude about work. Work has moved down the scale in personal importance. This attitude change has furthered the take-care-of-yourself point of view, and that should cause business concern.

“Smithereens,” an avant-garde counterculture film that scored well in the late 1980s, described a world in which individuals looked after only themselves, cared nothing for those around them and bounced, like small pieces of a societal universe blown to “smithereens,” from conflict to conflict and from situation to situation.

The disengaged point of view has frustrated business leaders, who have responded with futile attempts to keep the old point of view alive. They are, in short, marketing to a world that no longer exists. Grocery stores are trying everything--ScanAmerica, Reward America, Coupon America, Sample America and a host of other marketing tools--to get hold of the elusive American shopper. Ace Parking lot tickets now contain advertisements on the back, as if more advertising could turn things around. Starting this fall, CNN will actually let viewers choose which stories they want to watch on the news.

Everywhere one turns, another bit of evidence pops up that business has responded quickly to this or that tiny adjustment of consumer behavior. Adjusting to the minutia, they have missed the big changes.

The evidence suggests that the problems these business strategies attempt to solve are not economic. Lowering interest rates, adjusting automobile rebates and offering a “brand-new lemony soap” will not change this mood.

Larger, less direct actions from political and corporate leaders must be used to confront these problems--sliding quality of life, the feeling that institutions cannot handle the problems and that leaders are not up to the task, inequitable distribution of natural and financial resources, and the growing sense that things are coming apart.