Portrait of the Recession: Disposable Workers, Jobs : Economy: Downsizing companies are cutting our safety net. Laid-off employees question their self-worth.

Let’s set the record straight: More Americans have jobs today than at any time in history. Half of us who are middle-aged have worked for our employer for 20 years or more. When asked if we are generally satisfied with our jobs, most Americans--80% to 90%--say yes, just as our parents did when pollsters asked them a generation ago.

True, the Fortune 500 companies have furloughed 4.4 million workers since 1980, but remember the farmers who poured off the land in the ‘50s and all the people without jobs in the ‘60s? We said they’d never find meaningful employment again, yet the economy absorbed them and in the process we became a richer nation. Somehow we did it again in the ‘80s, with disposable per capita income nearly doubling to $16,318 between 1980 and 1991.

So what’s all the anxiety about?

It’s about losing our safety net and having to question our sense of self-worth.

Suddenly, it seems, we all feel expendable, maybe obsolete. We’re being “downsized,” which sounds like something you do to a garment, not a person, and service, expertise, loyalty don’t count for much. Nothing seems secure. Our Social Security payments are in eventual jeopardy, and two-thirds of the major corporations have curtailed retiree health plans or intend to in 1993, according to the A. Foster Higgins consulting firm.

Whether the motivation to work is money or fulfillment, our job or career defines us. It gives us, as Sigmund Freud said, “a secure place . . . in the human community.” It is the logo on our foreheads, the second paragraph in our obituaries.

It is part of the unspoken covenant people like Phil Nolan made with their companies: Give me respect and security; I in return offer you my loyalty and labor.

From the day he went to work for Sears, Roebuck at age 17, changing tires, Nolan thought of the company more as a family than an employer. The son of rural parents who lived near the poverty line, Sears was his passport to the American dream, and for six years he studied nights to get his college degree. He didn’t take a vacation for a decade and for years worked six days a week while claiming only five for pay purposes.

“I figured that’s how you got ahead,” he said. In a way it was, and Sears rewarded him handsomely. By the time the phone call came one February morning a year ago, Nolan, a 37-year Sears employee and the manager of the Middletown, N.Y., store, had a salary of nearly $90,000 and 300 people who reported to him.

“I hate to tell you, Phil,” the district manager had said when he called that morning, “but you’re one of the managers getting bumped. You’ve got 30 days. Don’t feel bad about this. You haven’t done anything wrong. A lot of managers are getting bumped.”

“Don’t feel bad?” Nolan replied. “This is my goddamn life you’re talking about.”

The financial aspects of being jobless were, of course, frightening. Nolan had a monthly mortgage of $1,284 and alimony payments of $1,000 and retailers were not looking to hire 55-year-old men. With luck, an employment counselor told him, he might find work, probably part-time, paying $5 or $6 an hour. But what gnawed on Nolan worse than the loss of income was a thought Joseph Conrad had once expressed: A man is a worker. If he is not that, he is nothing.

“You lose your self-esteem when you lose your job,” Nolan said. “You find even thinking about talking to someone about a job is difficult. I felt that somewhere I had failed, that I left on a failing note. Sears had been my life--I didn’t even have any friends who weren’t Sears people--and all of a sudden that’s taken away, like a death in the family. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t really enjoy Christmas this year. What are friends meant to say, ‘I’m sorry’? That’s what you say at a wake.”

Nolan settled in the town of Ashfield (population 1,200) in western Massachusetts. He married a second time--his new wife was an 18-year Sears employee--and chopped and split by hand seven cords of wood to stay busy over the winter. In March, the week his year’s severance pay ran out, he and Doreen took over the local convenience store. They’ve installed a lunch counter with home-cooked items like meatloaf and shepherd’s pie, and Doreen says, “It’ll take time, but this is going to work. We’ve been open two weeks and business is up 25%. Personally, I think we’re sitting on a little gold mine. Besides, it’s good to see Phil smile again.”

If one is looking for a portrait of the recession and the jobless recovery, it is the face of Phil Nolan--the white-collar worker who bought into the company dream and discovered he was as disposable as a time-worn machine.

Dean Farness of Santee, Calif., a 10-year employee of General Dynamics, learned that too. He returned to work March 15 from a bereavement leave following the accidental death of his son and was told he was being fired as part of the company’s downsizing. Brent Farness would have been 7 years old that day. (A General Dynamics spokesperson said the company was “dismayed” at the timing and handling of Farness’s layoff.)

“A company can’t say I’m going to buy your brains and to hell with your feelings,” said Ian Mitroff of USC’s School of Business Administration. “We’re just beginning to apply some of the concepts of the dysfunctional family to organizations and we find all the same mechanisms are there--the beating up on people, the denial, all the craziness. We haven’t learned how to treat people as whole human beings when they come to work.”

In the Depression year of 1930, the substantial citizens who made up the National Economic League identified the nation’s top problems as, first, the administration of justice; second, Prohibition; third, lawlessness. Unemployment ranked 18th. This time no one is oblivious or immune, and for the first time since World War II, white-collar workers are being added to the jobless ranks at about the same rate as blue-collar workers.

Of the job losses in the four previous recessions, 44% were the result of layoffs in which victims expected to get recalled. This time only 15% are because of layoffs.

In Flagstaff, Ariz., Jewell Russell, 51, a man raised on timber dollars, is about to start looking for work for the first time since he was a teen-ager.

“I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t depressed,” he said. “I made a good salary, as good as a teacher or anyone else, and there wasn’t a day I didn’t like coming to work. I always felt working with lumber was an important job. You’d see a building go up from lumber we cut and you felt good.”

Russell is one of 92 people who will lose their jobs when Flagstaff’s last lumber mill, operated by Stone Forest Industries, shuts down this month and a hometown industry that dates back to the 1880s becomes history, a victim of stringent environmental regulations that have taken the profitability from local logging. Russell, a finishing supervisor and 33-year company employee, will help prepare the mill site for auction, then move on to a new job in a new career in a new town.

“When I phoned my wife to tell her the mill was closing,” Russell recalled, “Jonell said, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll make it somehow. This isn’t the end of the world.’ But it sure feels like it. She figured this was going to happen and she’s already taken a hospital job in Phoenix because we need two incomes. I’ll tell you, I’m going to miss Flagstaff. We’ve got a lot of friends here. I can always come back to see them, but that wouldn’t be the same, would it?”

Talk to Russell or just about anyone being squeezed by the globalization and computerization of the economy, and what you hear is that the ultimate objective of work is survival--a far different thesis than Aristotle advanced when he declared that just as the ultimate goal of war was peace, the final objective of work was leisure. Leisure today is expensive, Oprah and Geraldo grow tiresome as a daily diet and who even remembers the days when we were headed toward the 35-hour week?

Although the lifetime hours we spend at work have declined because we stay in school longer and retire earlier, our workweeks are getting longer, having increased to 49 hours from 41 hours in 1973, according to Priority Management Systems, an office consulting firm.

More than 4% of us work 60 or more hours a week at our primary job, the U.S. Labor Department says, and in manufacturing, we average only 12 vacation days a year (the Germans get 30.) We have fewer annual holidays (11) than any industrialized nation except Japan (9). Two-thirds of married women, and 53% of teen-agers are in the work force, a 10% rise over 25 years. Twenty-two million Americans take work home, for which they are usually not specifically paid, as part of their primary or secondary jobs.

“Don’t tell me the American workingman is lazy,” said Leo Mills, who kept his job with AT&T; by moving from Houston to Denver but lost his marriage in the process. “Put one of us against 10 workers in any other country and we’ll beat them every time. We are a nation of producers.”

But, asks Mills, how can you produce when they take your job away? And because of automation and increased efficiency many of our jobs have became as antiquated as that of the newspaper Linotype operator. AT&T; and the Baby Bells, for example, are handling 50% more calls with 40% fewer workers than they did a few years ago.

At one of the Baby Bells, Denver-based US West, which is in the process of trimming its payroll from a 1984 peak of 70,400 to 57,800, typist Russ Carrick watched technology eat away at his job security as the increasing use of company computers lessened the need for transcriptions in the typing pool.

“I could see where technology was going,” said Carrick, 41. “We had a company meeting and I said, this is what I want to do--be a sales rep. They said, ‘Are you sure you can handle it?’ and I said, let me prove that I can either succeed or fail. They sent in two people from Minnesota to train me one-on-one for 10 weeks and the first time I went on line, I sold the most expensive deluxe package we have. I was in shock.”

So Carrick, US West’s first totally blind sales representative, sat at his desk the other day, his black Labrador, Kelly, at his feet, and through the magic of technology that did not exist a decade ago spoke with pride of being ranked in the company’s top 10% of salespersons.

He had committed to memory a thick handbook of rates and regulations and services and kept notes on the Braille-writer to his left. But the heart of what enabled him to perform his $30,000-a-year job was the computer that responded to his keystrokes, instructing a voice synthesizer to read requested information into the headset he wore. If a customer wanted to know his account balance, for instance, Carrick typed the letters B-A to access line 21 of the computer screen and the voice box recited to him the balance due.

“This job has unleashed a lot of creative energy in me,” Carrick said. “When you get to the point that you can say, This is who I am. This is what I can do, both you and the company benefit. The reality is, though, technology is moving so fast and I suppose that’s a fear. I just hope the technology out there for people like myself will move with it and not lag behind.”

Carrick became an example of a modern survivor by sacrificing and taking risks. There is something reassuringly old-fashioned in his techniques.

Yet the workplace our forefathers knew--and spent 70 to 80 hours a week at in the mid-19th Century--was neither secure nor compassionate nor welcoming. Benjamin Franklin lamented how many working days were being wasted “expensively at the ale house” and Henry Ford became so alarmed when the turnover rate at his plant hit 370% in 1914 that he hired a team of sociologists. During the Great Depression, the Industrial Workers of the World marched through the streets chanting, “We go to work to get the dough to get the food to get the strength to go to work.”

Through it all our productivity--the main source of long-term gain in living standards--grew, quintupling this century, with salaries and benefits and the size of corporate payrolls swelling so rapidly through the Vietnam era that, as Washington, D.C., economist Sar Levitan notes, our tolerance for hardship became less and our expectation of gain, greater.

The sign outside the United Auto Workers union hall in Grand Prairie, Tex., near General Motors’ Arlington assembly plant, asks visitors to park foreign-made cars “elsewhere.” Union workers have lost bargaining power as union membership fell from 20% of the workforce in 1983 to 16%, but Local 276 President Dave Perdue talks hopefully about the improved quality of American cars--”it’s not just cosmetic; it’s a fact,” he says--and refers to Hondas as a “small child-like car.” On the wall by his desk is a poster-size photograph of his son, a Marine, in Operation Desert Storm.

Perdue’s local has been in the news of late because the Arlington plant had been on GM’s hit list. Perdue and his autoworkers orchestrated a convincing argument for its survival, and in February GM announced it would close the Ypsilanti, Mich., plant instead. Four hundred and twenty workers--about one-tenth of Ypsilanti’s work force--accepted transfers to Texas. In an era when the average American will have 11 different addresses and seven different jobs during his lifetime, relocation may not seem like a big deal--except to those who have to uproot families, households and everything familiar on a few weeks’ notice.

“I’m trying real hard to be positive and I’ve gotten through the angry stage,” said Maria Croswell, whose husband, Paul, 40, is a spot welder, a job handled by robots in Ypsilanti’s Willow Run plant. “I come from a large Italian family and we’re always together. This is killing my father. He’s 70 and he doesn’t understand why we had to move to Texas, why we’re not together. I said, ‘Dad, we didn’t have a choice. Paul has to work.’

“The other day I’m feeling pretty good. We’re about to close on a house and things seem to finally be falling in place. Then my husband gets a call from a friend in Ypsilanti who says he heard we’re not getting the station wagon here. If we’re not going to build the station wagon, there’s no second shift and Paul’s out of a job. I lost it. I just started crying. I called Dave Perdue and said, Dave, what’s going on? He said, ‘Rumors. Just rumors, coming from the people in Ypsilanti who are mad they didn’t have a chance to move to Texas.’

“I know that if it wasn’t for GM, we wouldn’t be in a position to own a house or the things we do. I appreciate that. But there’s just so much confusion, you want to say to GM, damn you, for tearing my family apart. Our daughter, Joyce, she says she can’t stand it in Texas and she’s going back to Michigan. She’s 20 and that’s her choice, but still it comes like a kick in the head when we’re working so hard to keep the family together.”

Thomas Edison once said, “As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey,” and Paul Croswell would agree, counting himself fortunate to be among the record 118 million Americans with jobs. But that total is misleading. Twenty million of them have only part-time jobs, and of the unemployed in 1992, 1.1 million were listed as “discouraged workers”--people who wanted a job but were not looking because they felt a job search would be fruitless.

From Bank of America tellers in San Francisco to United Airlines skycaps at a dozen airports, more and more Americans are learning the new corporate reality: It is often cheaper to hire part-time workers, temporaries and consultants who are easily dismissible and don’t require health care or other benefits. They are, in short, disposable.

The trend may become more pronounced as global competition increases--even Korea complains these days that it can’t compete with the cheap labor offered in Sri Lanka and Thailand--and the U.S. economy continues its transformation, moving from an agricultural base to manufacturing then to services.

The largest private employer in the United States is not one of the corporate giants whose names are household words; it is Manpower Inc., of Milwaukee, which last year found temporary employment for 560,000 Americans in jobs ranging from computer programming to factory-line assembly. (About one-third of Manpower’s “temps” traditionally work themselves into permanent positions.)

Oftentimes company executives are responsible for creating the conditions that lead to employee reductions--and, along with stockholders, are the beneficiaries of the resultant reliance on low-cost “temps.”

The late Steven Ross, for example, is said to have made $196 million when he merged his Warner Communications with Time Inc. in 1989 and saddled the new company with $11 billion in debt. The next year Ross earned $4 million in salary and bonuses and $74 million in a stock swap. Not surprisingly the new company found itself in a budget crunch by 1991 and had to eliminate 605 jobs, including 44 at Time magazine.

One of the writers who left Time that year, voluntarily by taking a buyout, was Chris Ogden, the magazine’s chief diplomatic correspondent.

For Ogden, a lot has changed since then but not much is different. He still writes a column for Time’s international edition and still works out of Time’s eighth-floor Washington, D.C., office, at his same desk overlooking L Street. What has changed is that he now works for Time on a year-to-year contract, doing the same job for less pay and with none of the benefits that cost his employer an estimated $30,000 a year.

And complaints? None at all. “It’s a trade off,” said Ogden, 47, who also is working on a book. “I’ve got a lot less certainty in my life and a lot more independence. You’re scared at first, but there is adrenalin, a sense that you’re doing it on your own. People keep saying, ‘You look so happy,’ and I am. The freedom is great.

“I look around at what’s happening in the economy and it struck me the other day that I am the future.”