by Louis Uchitelle
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Product Description
Layoffs have become a fact of life in today’s economy; initiated in the mid 1970s, they are now widely expected, and even accepted. It doesn’t have to be that way.
In The Disposable American, award-winning reporter Louis Uchitelle offers an eye-opening account of layoffs in America–how they started, their questionable necessity, and their devastating psychological impact on individuals at all income levels. Through portraits of both executives and workers at companies such as Stanley Works, United Airlines, and Citigroup, Uchitelle shows how layoffs are in fact counterproductive, rarely promoting efficiency or profitability in the long term. Recognizing that a global competitive economy makes tightening necessary, Uchitelle offers specific recommendations for government policies that would encourage companies to avoid layoffs and help create jobs, benefiting workers, corporations, and the nation as a whole.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Good to read while waiting to be laid off, 2008-08-06
Useful if grim and inconslusive look at another truly American phenomenon: layoffs.
The earlier parts of the book give a background and case study in how layoffs were once more or less an unthinkable last resort to how they're just business as usual these days. Back when businessmen could attempt to care about more than just shareholder value, layoffs were seen as a disgrace. Today, they're the right thing to do, and even the laid off worker can agree with that given the very rational logic that precludes the action in today's theology known as businesss and greed.
Uchitelle uses the example of the Stanley tool company from New Britain, Connecticut. Once a proud local company that hand-made trusty tape measures and tools, it's now the classic corporation of today: global, fiercely competitive, and run by bloodless MBAs who don't understand why anyone would really be surprised by layoffs. If anything, Uchitelle himself, in the tone, is surprised by the surprise.
So why the book? Because, he suggests, layoffs have an impact on people that cannot be measured in Excel. An impact on the individual and collective psyche that probably can't be quantified in any meaningful way, because you can't truly measure hopelessness, despair, and the destruction of people or little parts of them in dollars and cents. All of the economic statistics in the world cannot reveal the true picture of a people and the underlying rage or pacifism that are produced by layoffs.
It used to be different, Uchitelle reminds us. A CEO might walk the floor of the plant and know people. Today, they move the office far away and don't know you, and they don't care.
And nobody cares.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences, 2008-08-02
I have not received this book. I have notified the book seller. I have not been provided with a UPS tracking number
3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Mildly Socialist, 2007-10-15
While the book is well written and contains a number of stories that are worth reading, the only slightly hidden socialist leanings of the author ruin it for me. The key failure that Uchitelle makes is to assume that constancy is a plausible choice.
This is important - Just because it would be NICE for things to always stay the same as they were a decade ago, that doesn't make it feasible. And no amount of assumptions or nostalgia will make it come true. The world is going to change, competitors are going to make doing things the same way for a decade unfeasible, and using expensive labor to compete with cheap labor is going to get very hard to pull off.
Uchitelle bemoans CEOs who use downsizing, restructuring, outsourcing, and layoffs to "Pad the bottom line" when really they're keeping their companies afloat. At the end of the first chapter, he includes a very Scrooge-like framing of the CEO of Stanley works - who brought the firm from floundering against cheaper Asian imports back to profitability - because he talks about the results he achieved in improving net income and earnings for the company (which is, by the way, his job). Uchitelle would like the reader to view this rapacious capitalist as some evil tyrant who lined his own pockets at the expense of those he fired. However, he neglects to consider the alternative scenario.
Would Stanley works REALLY have kept all those fired workers employed into 2006? NO! Stanley would be bankrupt, and EVERYONE would be out of a job. The CEO Uchitelle decries has saved the jobs he could, saved millions in investor capital (Some of which came from the very workers Uchitelle claims to defend through things like 401k), brought jobs and opportunities to developing countries, rescued a brand, and in general saved a company.
It's very easy to demonize corporate leaders by simply assuming they have the option to do nothing, and we'll all live happily ever after. Unfortunately, change happens, capitalism requires a helmet, and we don't live in the magical world of puppy dogs and lollipops where everyone can work the same job forever without facing outside competition. Out here in the real world, the options are (A) - Fire a few people and keep the company profitable, or (B) Fire everyone and close up shop. Do I think that these are the only two choices available every time? No. I also think layoffs are often done poorly, but this book takes a very naive world view to draw child-like conclusions that reak of "layoffs are bad because they make daddy unhappy".
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
 We Are Contractors, 2007-08-01
"The Disposable American" appropriately touches on many areas outside of, but directly related to lay-offs: sociology, culture, media, politics, public policy, and the psychological condition of those involved.
Lay-offs are an important topic but the way it's presented seems too subtly poignant and explicitly tragic. Within the first couple pages of "The Disposable American" author Uchitelle sets the tone with a term for these millions of layed-off American workers: "victim." The word "victim" is used all-over the spectrum in modern-day America and frankly, it gets tiring. So, layed-off workers are victims? Quite a strong term. I wouldn't refer to them as this. (But I do believe working and middle-class blue and white-collar employees are no longer winners in today's society.) And conditions won't be changing for the better in the short and long-term future. Employees need to adapt and psychologically view themselves as contractors. Contractors, is what we were today. And it's not entirely negative. It can be positive. "You....are not your job." Your self-worth should not be associated with your job title nor tenure in today's work-world.
Economic reality + social engineering. This is they way things are because it's expedient for investors and it's *planned* to be that way. 37 states have At-Will employment laws. U.S. labor laws are the worst in the industrialized world.
One of the many examples in "The Disposable American" is IBM. IBM publicly stated in 1994 that workers who are efficient, loyal, and productive cannot be guaranteed job security at IBM. When thousands were layed-off from IBM they were rehired to work for....IBM....as contractors. The company concluded that workers who fear lay-offs can provide more "adequate" results (page 145). Employees that were retained (not let go) were "shell-shocked" and still afraid of losing their jobs afterward. Even though a Harvard Business School Study specifically concluded the wrong workers were layed-off and the ones retained often weren't (and still aren't today) trained to deal with the new responsibilities and additional workload (page 194).
Increasing immigration is also welcomed. Immigrants are less likely statistically to complain about conditions or labor codes, and provide employers with a large pool or workers at the low end of the pay scale.
Uchitelle's personal sob stories of working stiffs having to leave one mundane dead-end job for another is really nothing new. Staying in the same industry is Old School. Dinosaurs. Do Defined Benefit Pension Programs enslave employees and tie them to a company and industry? Are these workers too lazy or stupid to invest on their own for their future? 401Ks for most are a scam: limited investment choices that especially hurt older contributors and hidden fees that significantly eat into returns the longer a worker stays at the same company, and doesn't roll it over into their own IRA that often have lower expense ratios of their choosing. People don't stay in the same industry and/or with the same company for a long time, and those that do risk having to transition into new gigs unexpectedly in their twenties, 30s, 50s, and beyond.
In this book there are many individual and family stories of personal circumstances. Many personal stories using a person's first name, hometown, and former "career" are elucidated. Then descriptions of the financial and emotional difficulties faced by those who get layed-off/down-sized/riffed are noted. The politically correct corporate euphemism is "Involuntarily separated." <---I like this one.
The Lay-Off Routine Is Well Refined:
Airplane mechanics are important. Their work assures planes fly safely. But their jobs can be contracted (outsourced) inside the U.S. When these mechanics were layed-off en masse they were invited to a hotel and given a seminar to be "counseled out." The speaker told them that credit card and mortgage companies gave "special consideration" to layed-off workers. The counselor held up a sample form letter to creditors, for all to see. The layed-off worker can request a reduction in monthly payments for these debts temporarily. They were instructed to ask for the reduction before they get "60 days behind on a debt." And they were also given the book "Who Moved My Cheese."
Lay-Off expansion and political opportunism of the 1990s:
In the mid-1990s lay-offs transcended from not only the blue collar industries but to the white collar and professional industries. At this time, more media attention was given not only to the lay-offs themselves but *how* people were being let go. CEOs were going public giving news conferences to publicize lay-offs in the hope that their company stock would go up. Political Translation: too many voters were losing their jobs and the Presidential, Congressional, and State elections were only months away in 1996. Pat Buchanan was very successful in tapping into voter anxiety and angst by his protectionist "save-the-jobs" policies.
Factual truths from this book:
1. Lay-offs and lack of job security will continue for several decades or longer.
2. If a layed-off worker gets more training and education they will maintain or increase their current market value. This is statistically false.
3. The savings of laying-off workers will help companies and in the long-run workers will be better off.
The solutions give the layed-off the right to sue, and Uchitelle even advocates taxing people with higher incomes. Like this money will be redirected to the layed-off or pay for retraining, and such? It won't be re-directed, and it should not be. Furthermore, it won't happen and it's not fair.
The index is large, and there are many book titles author Louis
Uchitelle cited and noted throughout the book. This book is about us. And it's also about you, even if you think you are safe.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
AMERICAN DISPOSABLE , 2007-05-30
I have just finished re-reading David Halberstam's The Fifties as part of an attempt to better understand that period as the foundation of many social, political and economic and cultural post-war trends that continue, or have been expanded on, today. The book under review, to its credit, puts forth an analysis that undermines one critical part of the `myth' of the Fifties. That is the proposition that `a rising tide lifts all ships'. Given the tremendous advantage the American capitalist economy had after its World War II victory combined with certain ameliorative changes in corporate and labor culture there was a seeming feeling that things would keep getting better and better. That based, of course, on an assumption that one did not challenge the capitalist basis on which this system was built. Today, after the victory of that unchallenged assumption, the chickens have come home to roost. The classic case for what amounted to class collaboration was the `partnership' between the Walter Reuther-led United Auto Workers and Detroit's Big Three automakers in the immediate post-World War II period. The result was the closest that this country has ever come to a Europeon social-democratic arrangement between business and labor. The recent purchase of one of the Big Three, Chrysler, by a private equity company that will inevitably entail another massive round of layoffs in the already devastated American auto industry was greeted without a peep by the Auto Workers Union. Times have changed, and not for the better.
Thus, clearly those days of so-called `social contract' derived capitalism, whether illusionary at the time or not, are over and have been for a while. The most compelling data centers on the seemingly never-ending fact that while those who manage the capitalist empire has vastly increased their wealth and position the mass of Americans has either been spinning their wheels or going under. This book is an `up close and personal' look at those who did not make it for one reason or another but mainly because they were caught up in the vise of a dramatic changeover in corporate culture which can be paraphrased bluntly as the `survival of the fittest'. One thing that is clear from all the interviews, unfortunately, is that few working people, and this book is really about working people, have a political clue about what has happened to them and why. Or, moreover, what to do about it. The amount of self-doubt, personal guilt and bafflement expressed in the book shows more clearly than any current theoretical Marxist treatise that I have read why this runaway capitalist system is still in place. Still, if these interviews emphasize that the task to change things may be daunting it nevertheless needs to be done. While the author offers no particular remedy for this growing economic inequality he does perform a service by laying out the problem. It is our task to break the logjam. And given the dominant corporate culture and its ruthless workings the fight will not be pretty.
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