SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA JOB MARKET: WORK AND FAMILY : THE NEW WORKER EXPOSED : Toiling at Home Unmasks White-Collar Ditherings

Replaying over and over like a loop of audiotape, this little fragment of familial conversation comes drifting out of countless American homes every day:

Little Kid: Daddy, what do you do at work?

Father (greatly pleased): Well, Chuckie boy, thought you’d never ask. Daddy’s in exotic fasteners. Marketing. I . . .

Little Kid: Oh. Are we gonna go to the zoo on Saturday?

Deflating as it is to Daddy’s ego, this exchange also gives him something to be happy about: His job will remain a complete mystery to his incurious offspring. These days, that is all to the good. Let me back up to explain.

Awhile ago, when we had a Jeffersonian yeomanry and class of artisans, a child could understand and appreciate work. His father made things, fixed things or grew things, simple things all, and did so under the eyes of his wife and children. They often helped out, and the family, laboring as a team, formed a work unit as well as a social unit.

Later, the father worked farther away, alone, and his job began to take on its first faint tinge of mystery. But it still could be understood by his wife and, with only a little effort, by his children. Astonishingly, some of the latter are on record as actually inquiring about it and seeming interested in the replies.

This era, known to scholars as the Beaver Cleaver Period, was snuffed out by increased job specialization and the onrush of women into formerly male workplace preserves. It is now possible to find households in which neither husband nor wife would be capable of explaining to Junior--assuming he tore himself away from Nintendo long enough--about his or her work. It is just too narrow or complicated.

(Sometimes, even one adult partner can’t understand what the other actually does for a living. A male editor I know is married to a woman prominent in advanced genetic research requiring the cloning of various teeny critters. Asked what it’s like to live in constant bafflement about his wife’s occupation, he says, “I don’t mind so much, so long as she washes her hands real well before she fixes supper.”)

We are still in this period and likely to remain there for a millennium or so. But parallel with it we also can see the rapid and fearsome rise of what may be called the New Work.

It is defined as those nonessential white-collar ditherings and putterings that are becoming a hallmark of modern business, or at least that part that the Japanese have allowed their dispirited colonials to pursue. Here’s how it goes for the vast populations doing it:

A bunch of paper lands on the left side of the desk of a New Worker at International Zyzx, which uses Indonesian labor to make salad-bar sneeze guards it sells to chain restaurants with names like Chicken Wing-a-Ding and Pluto’s House of Pork. The New Worker reads the bunch of paper, a daring proposal that envisions slicing an inch and a half off the sneeze-guard length to cut costs and enhance profits.

After a month spent having meetings about it, holding teleconferences about it and jetting around to talk to people about it, the New Worker will add to the pile his own piece of paper. It will be so cautiously worded that no one will be able to tell whether he likes the idea or hates it. (A kind of judicious cowardice is one of the few skills requirements of the New Work.) Then he moves the pile to the right side of the desk, where it will be picked up and taken to a colleague who will do the same thing all over again.

That’s it. That’s the New Work. Its meaning and importance are sometimes hard to explain to the face in the mirror, much less to a spouse or to children. Better for us all, then, that what Daddy--and/or Mommy--actually does at the office remains a mystery. This is the last mercy that can be shown a New Worker.

But now the people who decide such things are preparing to strip away even that. They want millions more of us to work at home.

Makes all kinds of sense, they say. Saves gasoline and tires. Eases urban congestion and thereby spares the environment. Gives the good old nuclear family unit more time together and more cohesion, sort of like it was when we wore tricorn hats and bonnets and everybody helped bring in the hay. So why not?

Here’s why not. If some lemming-like rush toward working at home indeed materializes, we can kiss goodby to what’s left of that good old nuclear family.

Flushed from his office in the city, all the occupational flaws of the New Worker (male gender in this case) will be glaringly exposed at home. Unable to tell blonde jokes around the water cooler, he will procrastinate by alphabetizing the spice shelf and insisting on tossing the football around with a kid who would rather be doing anything else. He will become a pest.

His family will be able to look on as he debases himself before his superiors, waffles his conclusions, shows fear. His computer, modem and fax will divert the kids for about a week before they realize that grown men should not be spending their lives mulling the proper length for salad-bar sneeze guards. His spouse will catch on much faster.

The little respect he once commanded, respect derived from the veil of mystery surrounding his work, will disappear as that tattered remnant is lifted before their eyes. Is it not inevitable that in the end they will come to view him with a mixture of pity and mild contempt--and that this will undermine them all?

So if the boss allows you to work at home, tell him you’d rather not. It is said that there are two things no one should ever see being made, sausage and politics. You can add to that the New Work.