There’s An Upside To Downsizing

He is 50-something and he feels betrayed. A couple of corporations have played a game of checkers and they have swept his job and his decades of loyalty right off the game board as if they never happened. He is not alone.

Downsizing. It’s happening everywhere. Last week, Bell Atlantic and Nynex announced a merger that will eliminate 3,000 jobs. The trend is particularly stark in telecommunications, where AT&T has eliminated 40,000 jobs.

It is common, in reports of a downsizing, to mention critically the benefits to shareholder profits and the high salaries of CEOs who make the cuts.

It is not so common, nor is it easy, to put the immediate tragedy of a lost job into perspective.

At the human level, while individuals lose good jobs they don’t lose the qualities that made them good employees. So they find new jobs; nationally, the average displaced worker has a new job within eight weeks.

At the national level, the U.S. economy is producing more new jobs than it’s losing. Since 1993 the number of U.S. jobs has grown by 8.5 million and the unemployment rate, at 5.6 percent, is half the unemployment rate in Europe. In fact downsizing is a story as old as business; changes in consumer demand, technology and trade have continually caused some industries to shrink and new ones to spring up. Profitable firms are not the ones to be insulted, they’re the ones responding to the market and equipped with resources to survive and grow.

At the local level, none of us can control these brutal games of corporate checkers. But what can communities do to create new hope for displaced workers, and to keep their local economies growing?

Many Spokane business people have participated lately in development of the New Century Plan, whose goals include improving local wages and job opportunities. The emerging strategies are relevant to anyone shaken by the downsizing trend. Local schools and colleges have to learn what skills employers want these days, and impart them. Local residents have to take responsibility for acquiring the skills that will make them employable.

And, local employers ought to consider hiring older, discarded but still valuable workers.

This being an area where small business dominates, Spokane is in a better position than a heavily industrialized “company town.” That’s because small business creates the vast majority of new jobs. So the challenge, here, is to maintain the friendly tax and educational climate that small, even home-based businesses require. More than a few laid-off corporate workers go on to become entrepreneurs who control their own destiny and earnings.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board