Workers And The Century Despite The Stock Market's Surge, 'Worker Insecurity' Takes A Toll
By Michael J. Carroll
POSTED: September 06, 1999
(Philadelphia Inquirer)
In testimony before a Senate Banking Committee, Alan Greenspan once attributed our unusually damped inflation to "worker insecurity."
"Worker insecurity" is what prevents the average Joe or Jane from asking for a raise, for child care, for better health insurance - for anything at all, really. The insecurity reminds workers that if they make demands, they may lose their jobs. They may lose them individually by getting fired, or they may lose them as a group when all the jobs in the workplace go overseas.
Forgive the audacity, but there is something more than a little wrong for so much insecurity to exist side by side with so much stock-market wealth. I would even suggest that this immorality merits investigation by our elected representatives.
We constantly hear that our economy must be lean and mean - ruthless, really. Otherwise we will be overwhelmed by foreign competition. Maybe we could just once deal with the foreign threat by using our unrivaled powers to improve wages and working conditions in those poor, far away places to which our jobs flee.
It's easy to see how textile, steel and electronics factory jobs are shipped overseas. Move the mills and move the looms, or just build new ones in Mexico, Singapore or Korea.
But why are teachers, social workers and government workers feeling that worker insecurity? You can't see American social-work clients in Malaysia, or teach our school kids in the Philippines, or check out our groceries from China - not yet at least. You cannot collect Philadelphia's trash with the low-wage workers living in the Mexican border region.
But you can downsize, privatize and out-source those jobs if the workers get out of line. And you can hire from the millions of permanent part-time employees who will spend their careers earning partial salaries and partial benefits, if they get any benefits at all. It's the next cheapest thing to exporting jobs. Worker insecurity strikes again.
Worker insecurity sends the message to middle-age workers, white-collar and blue- : Keep quiet. Where are you going to go at your age? Recent years have shown the new lows that poor people have been allowed to fall to in this land, so pay attention. Take a lesson.
What is the price of worker insecurity, the social cost?
At best, lots of unhappy, resentful people.
At worst, hungry people, demoralized with all the social diseases we say we want to cure and to a great extent could cure: alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, spouse and child abuse.
We can do better, a lot better. The booming stock market, which seems to thrive on layoffs and downsizing, could boom a little less. Who knows? Maybe it would boom just as much with happier, more productive, more secure workers.
And if the two cannot go together, maybe it's time to rethink some basic ideas about who we are and what we want. Because the big winners are getting further and further away from the growing number of insecure big losers, and that seems neither healthy nor just.
Michael J. Carroll lives and writes in Philadelphia.