This Land Is Their Land….

Last night I saw Barbara Ehrenreich at the Seattle Public Library; she was lecturing on her latest book: This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation

 

From Publishers Weekly
When a hospital employee whose hospital-supplied insurance doesn’t cover her hospital-incurred bill finds her wages garnished, where’s a political satirist to go for material? Feisty, fearlessly progressive Ehrenreich offers laughter on the way to tears in 62 previously published essays that show the rich getting richer and poor getting poorer. She investigates pockets of poverty among undocumented workers, military families and recent college graduates. Ehrenreich’s reach is capacious, encompassing not only unemployment, health insurance and inflation, but corporate spying, cancer studies, marriage education, the abstinence training business and Disney’s Princess products. Her passion, compassion and wit keep these excursions lively and timely—even when yesterday’s headlines provide the immediate provocation, e.g., JetBlue’s snow snafu. The vignettes go down a bit like eating peanuts—too many at one time palls, but they’re not unhealthy, unless you have an allergic reaction to Ehrenreich’s message: America is being polarized between the superrich few and the subrich everyone else. Entertaining Ehrenreich certainly is, but she raises a hard, serious question: How many ‘wake-up calls’ do we need, people…? (May)

 

Ehrenreich was unassuming, sharp and entertaining, and I had the incredible opportunity to speak with her before the lecture. I don’t know that I made many friends at my table. After waiting a polite pause or two for questions like “Where do you live” and “how was your flight,” I pretty much pounced. With her two books, Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch, she has hit a nerve in me…and I believe there is a third idea out there – the burden the boomer children shoulder.

I’ve written previously on the topic of white collar layoff and would like to explore it further. So much so, that I’m starting another blog on the topic.

Back to the lecture…

Ehrenreich started the evening talking about how scapegoating is the latest tactic in taking focus away from larger issues. She posed the following thoughts:

…On the airport bathroom shenanigans that went on last year:

“Why is it that we are in a orange alert state, and there are police men with detail in airport bathrooms?”

On gay marriage:

“If you don’t like the idea of gay people getting married, don’t marry one.” 

Illegal immigration:

“There is a primitive rage at illegal workers who do all the manual work that make our lives possible.” People make $3/hr at a car wash because businesses get away with it.

She proposed a new scapegoat group: old white people. “They are lazy, play cards, lay on benches…all on the government’s dime – social security checks! What’s eating their money, drugs! We should be on the look out for geezer gangs to maintain their insulin and Lipitor habits.”

Ehrenreich went on to observe that we are in increasingly polarized society, a hot topic in books I cover in the social venture labs blog. That globalization is an excuse for pushing wages down for Americans but that the globalization trend does not affect CEO salaries. “You should put one of the border crossers in as CEO, because anyone who can get across the border has strong leadership characteristics – someone you would want in your company.”

She has a point, it wasn’t a Mexican who took the promise for a pension or hope for social security away from so many families – it was a CEO.

The theme I’m picking up on here after seeing Ehrenreich, Florida, Friedman another others speak comes back to a lecture I went to years ago: Azar Nafisi

“American values used to mean something real and concrete. Huck Finn ponders the question: should I give Jim up? He had been taught that to harbor a slave meant that you would go to hell. But he thought about Jim in the morning and Jim in the evening and Jim was his friend. Huck made a decision to help Jim – he was “going to hell.” 

American values meant the ability to make a tough decision by way of self analysis. Now….we sleep. Imagination (innovation, alertness) is the key to development (into maturity) and we risk losing it.”

 

Have we lost that ability to self reflect? What will it take (how much more damage needs to occur) before we start to rally like we have in the past?

Thoughts On Outsourcing

On my drive to work some time ago, I listened to a story on NPR about an animation studio farming out their Alvin & The Chipmunks to a firm in India. The image in my mind aside, I had to wonder what this culture must think of America when they are in essence helping to construct this somewhat iconic image cell by painful cell. I felt somewhat violated, like one country saw another country’s skivvies. (I would much rather the story were about story work seen on The Incredibles, Tomb Raider or some Disney animation…but Alvin, Simon and Theodore??)

While the story was celebrating the advancement in virtual meetings and time zone enabled 24 hour work schedules, I compared it to my own experience working on outsourced projects and have to claim that when all is said and done, I fail to see the real cost savings. Virtual communication advances aside (which do save time and money if used appropriately) I added up the hours it took me to complete the project, the phone calls, the additional meetings, the travel, the language and cultural issues…it’s quite expensive and in the end, the quality of the work suffered. I read the rather alarmist The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman and have to say, agree with most of his observations which basically boil down to: when it comes time for the next generation to apply for a job, a B student from Poughkeepsie will no longer beat out a PhD from China.

Tom Brokaw – Seattle: Leaving some important topics on the cutting room floor

Last night I stood in line for 45 minutes of uncharacteristically cold Seattle weather to hear Tom Brokaw speak at Town Hall.

In short:
- He was a straight talker with a sharp point of view, I enjoyed hearing him speak; I bought his latest book, “Boom.”
- The conversation with the lecturer was like watching a rather unchallenging series of softball throws, each question easier than the next. It showed that the interviewer felt he didn’t have much to add to prior interviews or even a strong opinion about the book. Brokaw was gracious and gave solid answers.
- Seattle never fails to disappoint, giving floor time to unscreened questions on conspiracy theories.

Brokaw must have left confirmed in his opinion of the Radical West. One thing bothered me though: my own lack of gumption in getting up to ask a question I felt strongly about–how the 50s and 60s laid the groundwork for an unspoken epidemic of white collar layoffs the Boomers are now suffering through.

The Boomers grew up being catered to in marketing, dreamt big, lived through a war, questioned hard and took the opportunity to break the rules in the 60s, made it through a tough recession in the 70s, some would argue that many went from hippies to yuppies and reaped the benefits of the 80s. As a demographic, they are hard pressed to make it unscathed through the massive economic restructurings of the 90’s and early decades of 2000. 

How then, can a book focused on “what happened in the 60s” not lay the groundwork for what is happening now in our workforce? According to a March 1996 series of articles in the New York Times, “The Downsizing of America,” 43 Million jobs have been lost since 1979 affecting nearly one-third of all households. 

I patiently waited my turn for him to sign my copy while the person ahead of me wasted our collective time berating Brokaw for “not personalizing.” Brokaw briefly commented: “Layoffs, it’s a big topic, we’re going through that at NBC.” Gone was my opportunity for a more thoughtful response from someone with such a meaningful vantage point. Never again will I miss my chance on the platform.

Downsizing in America makes the case that….(excerpt from Amazon book review)

“the media tends to favor the dramatic figures from large, well-known manufacturers. Manufacturing in America has been in long-term decline since 1967 and manufacturers have steadily shed jobs.  However, agriculture and manufacturing only provide employment for 15% of the population, so this segment is not a good proxy for the entire economy.”

“Downsizing”, it turns out, is corporate-speak for upsizing. Firms laid off one set of workers – disproportionately less-educated, older, female or parents of young children – and hired on another set, by implication younger, male and single. Was the resulting workforce more productive? No, there was no change in employee productivity. Moreover, non-managerial employees bore the brunt of the layoffs, so that claims to be ridding the company of “fat” actually increased the management-to-staff ratio.

Did investors reward companies for their action? Perception says that downsizing is followed by an increase in the stock price. The reality is that stock prices remain steady or decline after downsizing announcements.

So what were the benefits of downsizing? The authors come to a surprising, but authoritative conclusion. Downsizing announcements force down staff wages so that the firm retains more profit. Simple really, isn’t it?

The Wall Street Journal had a series of stories on the then epidemic of white collar layoffs, starting with the Kodak layoffs in the early 90s. They committed early on to print a story a week until someone stood up to do something, but after about 3 months, you just didn’t read about it anymore. It became the norm. The Dot Com Bubble made an art of such bolemic practices, bringing people in and letting them go, looking at this sort of hefty decision making as a growth opportunity for its management. 

Other links on Brokaw:
- Interview with KUOW
- Interview with TVGuide

News articles on the downsizing of America:
- The Downsizing of America
- The Downsizing and Demoralizing of the American Workforce
- Benchmarking Study Report