Recent News Reports About The Employment Picture example essay topic

Downsizing is the elimination of part of the workforce, especially in business and government, ostensibly for achieving a more efficient and cost-effective organization. It became an issue in the early stages of the 1996 U.S. Presidential campaign. Some think it was spawned by Pat Buchanan's political ambitions, a temporary blip on the screen. The politicians who won in 1996 would like us to believe that the problem has disappeared, that everything is fine and that they should receive the credit for their sound economic policies. Recent news reports about the employment picture give some support to that claim.

Consider this lead from a recent article in the business section of The Boston Globe: Even before Stephanie Balaouras graduated from Wellesley's Babson College, the 21-year-old senior had offers from two employers, including a spot at Andersen Consultants that seemed to have everything she wanted: travel, educational opportunities, and a salary range of $35,000 to $38,000 a year. It isn't that Balaouras is extraordinarily lucky. A tight labor market, coupled with increased demand for skilled employees, has made this year's graduating class the hottest in years. The Class of 1997 can boast of two, three, even four job offers each. 3 In April of 1997, unemployment in Massachusetts was at 4.1 percent, down from 9.1 percent in 1991.4 Some people believe that the downsizing that has taken place during the past decade is a function of the cyclical nature of economic activity, but analysis of the long-term trends in the world's economy leads to the opposite conclusion.

Downsizing is not a temporary phase of a rosy economic picture. It is part of a major transformation that will radically alter the entire meaning and function of work in the global marketplace as well as governmental organizations. The very nature of work itself, as we have known it since the Industrial Revolution, has changed and will never be the same again. The New York Times study of downsizing attributes some of the recent interest in the phenomenon of layoffs to the fact that the disappearing jobs are increasingly those of higher-paid white-collar workers in large corporations who are at the peak of their careers.

5 The anecdotes in the New York Times series focus on the managers whose employment has been terminated, but a New York Times editorial responding to the series concludes that "the families suffering the most right now are those at the bottom end of the scale, and that the distribution of wealth in the United States is growing increasingly inequitable". 6 David M. Gordon, a radical economist and director of The Center for Economic Policy Analysis at the New School for Social Research until his recent untimely death, gathered considerable evidence for the view that it continues to be workers, not managers, who are bearing the burden of the current economic trends. He challenges the claim that downsizing stems from the fact that corporations have become "lean and mean". In his book Fat and Mean, 7 Gordon insists that "the requiem for middle management has been premature", 8 pointing out that in the U.S. there were more managers in 1994 than there were in 1989 when downsizing began.

9 A new study by Professor Sherrill Spies, of Texas A&M University, supports Gordon's position. 10 The Clinton administration has bragged about the increase in the number of new jobs in recent years, but Gordon points out that two million of those jobs, a quarter of the total net expansion, is "more than double the managerial share at the beginning of the recovery". 11 He claims that the real problem in the U.S. is top-heavy corporations where the managerial class engages in "crude, arrogant and often gratuitous exercises of power"12 and where lower-paid workers are alone among advanced countries, because they have actually suffered "absolute declines in real earnings over the past couple of decades". 13 The average hourly compensation for production workers in manufacturing in the U.S. is eighth out of the twelve top countries, far behind Germany, Belgium, and Japan.

Gordon's proposed solution to the problem is that U.S. business should take "the high road", proposing a five-step program that would be an antidote to downsizing in particular and the poor treatment of workers in general. What should be done?