CAREERS : SHIFTING GEARS : Changing of the Guard : Diversity in Corporate America Has White Males Feeling Left Out

When Douglas Tennant, an electrical engineer, applied for a job at Pacific Gas & Electric, the company would only offer him work as a long-term independent contractor, not as a full-fledged employee.

“Informally, they told me that . . . what openings they had would most likely go to women and minorities,” he said. It wasn’t a perfect situation, but it also wasn’t too bad for a white male former defense industry worker desperate for a job.

So he took the position. But about a year later when PG&E; restructured, Tennant was laid off. However, his two teammates--a black woman with no engineering degree and an Indian man with a civil, not electrical, engineering background--kept their jobs, he said. Although Tennant, of Tracy, Calif., now has a high-tech job that makes him happy, the memory of his experience at PG&E; still upsets him.

“Those who stayed to do the same thing I was doing were less qualified than I, but were kept on because of political correctness,” he contends. “What they did to me was crummy.” PG&E; disputes Tennant’s version of the story and notes that all members of that contract work team are no longer at the company.

With corporate America culling its ranks, baby boomers scrambling to advance and industry anxious to diversify its work force, white men--particularly those in mid-career--are feeling increasingly left out, fearful and betrayed. The best jobs lost in the past decade have been theirs; the best jobs created in the future may not be.

Many view their new competition--women, blacks, Latinos and Asians--warily, certain that they have lost any chance for equal consideration in this shrinking job market. Still, not everyone is sympathetic.

“One white male came up to me and said, ‘I’m being treated like a minority, and I don’t like it,’ ” says Harris Sussman, president of Workways, a consulting firm that offers diversity seminars for large corporations. “On the one hand, you can hear that he’s angry and pained. On the other hand, the women and the nonwhites in the room may say, ‘So, welcome to the club.’ ”

Since the mid-1980s, recession-plagued industries have dispensed with their costliest and most-experienced workers through buyouts and downsizing--both long-term structural changes that have purged the workplace of layers of mid-level managers.

A large percentage of the replacement workers have been--and will continue to be--women, Latinos, Asians and blacks. The result is that white male workers are being squeezed from above and below. “It’s definitely a wrenching experience,” says David Lewin, director of the UCLA Institute of Industrial Relations.

The numbers of white men in the work force are dropping--and demographers say the trend will continue. The shift is even more dramatic in the managerial and professional ranks.

Last year 47.3% of the work force was composed of white men, down from 50.2% a decade earlier, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 1993, 53% of all professional and managerial workers were white men, a significant drop from 63.5% in 1983. Among the upper ranks, white women have been the major beneficiaries of men’s loss of dominance, although the decade has seen an increased number of Latinos, Asians and blacks become managers as well.

When looking for work, many white males are faced with want ads that exclude them. “You go through the paper, and the ads say, ‘English and Spanish preferred,’ ” recounts one former retailing executive now looking for work. “What this really means is you have to speak both. For me, not having any other language skill is something of a problem.”

At the office, where management often shows heightened concern about career opportunities for women and minorities, many white men feel any chance for advancement has withered away.

Against this backdrop, about a third of the nation’s largest firms have instituted “diversity awareness” training programs that try to explain the reasons for the attention on opening the workplace to all employees and to ease the pain that may cause.

However, such classes often do as much harm as good. “If you just put on a single diversity talk, people’s awareness may be raised to a point where they realize there’s not much diversity where they are,” Sussman says. “There is increasing discomfort and concern about it, especially by white men.”

AT&T;, which has trained nearly all its U.S.-based workers in diversity awareness, has recently added a seminar to its sensitivity training catalogue, one called “White Men: The Dilemma.” (Informally, the program is known as the “Whimpering White Men Lectures.”)

“One of the pleasant surprises is that the nonwhite male participants have told us that they come away from these courses with a more sensitive view of white men,” said Burke Stinson, an AT&T; spokesman. “The tendency to throw all white men into one pail is (one) they avoid.”

To many, however, it is still relatively easy to make sweeping generalizations about the need for a “natural correction” in the workplace that equalizes the job differences among the races and genders at the expense of the white male. Much more difficult, admits Sussman, is to deal with an individual’s concerns by supplying a personalized road map through the increasingly complex workplace.

One of the few guidelines he offers is for workers to kill what remaining shreds of loyalty they may still have for the company that employs them. “I believe the new reality is that everyone is self-employed,” he says, even if they work for a Fortune 500 firm. “The sooner they realize it, the better off they’ll be. They will no longer be stunned when they hear they are no longer needed.”