What’s Up Job-Wise Makes For Good Reading

How’s your job? The week’s reading suggests at least three responses to that question: What job? Which one of my jobs are you referring to? Or, compared to what?

Jeremy Rifkin’s “Vanishing Jobs” in October’s Mother Jones and Andrea Pyenson’s “Change Your Job, Save Your Life” in the September/October Natural Health tell you much if not most of what you need to know about what’s happening job-wise. (Interestingly, careers are barely mentioned.)

President Clinton’s warning that workers will have to be retrained six or seven times during their work lives - and House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s advice that every American worker become an independent contractor - are given a context by Rifkin that he says Washington never acknowledges.

“While corporate profits are heading through the roof, average families struggle to keep a roof over their heads. More than one-fifth of the workforce is trapped in temporary assignments or works only part time,” Rifkin writes. “Millions of others have slipped quietly out of the economy and into an underclass no longer counted in the permanent employment figures. A staggering 15 percent of the population now lives below the official poverty line.”

Rifkin predicts a “deep recession,” citing large drops in payrolls and manufacturing jobs, rising inventories and declining consumer spending and confidence. He outlines the global economy’s shift from “mass labor” to highly skilled “elite labor.”

“Factory workers, secretaries, receptionists, clerical workers, salesclerks, bank tellers, telephone operators, librarians, wholesalers, and middle managers are just a few of the many occupations destined for virtual extinction.”

Rifkin envisions products manufactured in “near-workerless factories” marketed by “near-virtual companies.” The model, he writes, is the toll that automation took on the unskilled jobs in which black workers were concentrated in the mid-‘50s, a toll that created an “underclass” that is now expanding to white males.

In her article, Pyenson delineates the “work zombie” who “awakens, washes, gulps down coffee, goes to work for an interminable day, then drags home, only to get up the next morning and do it all again.” Indeed, she writes, “the average worker is spending more and more time at the office and increasingly less time at home.”

She cites findings that in 1990 male workers were down to 17 hours of free time a week, less than half the amount their grandfathers had. (She adds that although males are cited in this survey, women face time problems that are “similarly dismal.”)

Both authors argue that time, not money, is the issue and that the 30-hour work week is the solution. Rifkin writes that working women, who now make up about half of the workplace, “may hold the key to whether organized labor can reinvent itself in time to survive the Information Age,” something that, he notes, will take time, since of the 83 unions in the AFL-CIO, only one is headed by a woman.

Two other unlikely but compelling sources for information about what’s happening to jobs and/or the economy are George Gurley’s treatment of Tom (“Bonfire of the Vanities”) Wolfe’s intriguing novelin-progress in the current New York Observer and Bret Primack’s “Blues in the Red” - about how jazz musicians cope with the economics of jazz - in the 25th-anniversary issue for September of JazzTimes. The latter issue is also worth checking out for Bob Blumenthal’s incisive interview with Clint Eastwood about jazz’s influence on his life and films.

Gurley’s piece describes the hero of Wolfe’s upcoming novel as Charlie Coker, a 60-year-old Manhattan tycoon supporting a 29-year-old bride with expensive tastes. Suddenly finding himself $200 million in the hole, not wanting to sell off his beloved quail plantation or Gulfstream IV jet, he decides to deal with his coming bankruptcy by laying off some of his workers.

Among them is another major character, Conrad Hensley, a 22-year-old “working stiff” with a net worth of $4,600 who risks his neck to save the life of a co-worker only to find out that he’s getting laid off. “Needless to say,” writes Gurley, “the lives of Coker and Hensley eventually intersect.”