The year is 1990. Stephen Holthausen is a fifty-year-old banker who is about to go through a devastating experience. He’s being laid off from the only job he has known for the last twenty-two years. He and his wife are headed for divorce. His lifestyle will slide so drastically that he will be forced to pump gas at a local station. He will eventually find work at a tourism information center in his town and retire at the age of fifty-eight.
The Disposable American, by The New York Times reporter Louis Uchitelle, is full of stories like Holthausen’s, stories about people deskilled, dehumanized, and displaced after being laid off from well-paying jobs or forced out of once-promising careers. In essence, this could be one of the most revealing books about the long-term effect of layoffs on the American worker. At the same time Uchitelle presents a well-researched report on flawed employment policies that the U.S. government continues to support.
Hardest to swallow are the profiles of people who were laid off in sectors such as banking, insurance, technology, and marketing—people left unemployed and aimless. Indeed, the reality Uchitelle finds is that most of the “victims” he chronicles never fully recover emotionally or monetarily. For banker Holthausen, the need to feel like a banker again overtakes his life. His daughter, newly graduated from college, sums it up best: “My Dad never gave up thinking of himself as a banker. [Unlike him] I am able to separate my self-worth from my worth as a worker. If what happens to him ever happens to me—I would be able to separate self from situation.”
One myth that Uchitelle sets out to discuss and deflate is that corporate America will hire again and create more jobs. Given the pervasiveness of layoffs and the societal resignation to layoffs as a fact of life, the new face of our economy appears to dispute this. Other myths concern the importance of education and training and the idea that the value of a worker can be measured in terms of dollars and cents. The problem with education and training for workers who have been laid off is that they now have to take their career into their own hands. According to one of Uchitelle’s academic sources at the University of Texas, “Young people in their twenties do manage to make the adjustment [after a layoff] but after the mid-thirties, that is unusual.”
So what are the solutions? Some of them are beyond the reach of the individual, Uchitelle writes. However, workers can regain some control through bargaining power. His other recommendations include revisiting unemployment data that is collected by the Bureau of Labor and Statistics: The number of so-called hidden layoffs may not factor into these statistics. And such lost data is harmful as we move forward. In the end, Uchitelle concludes that we as a society need to reconsider the importance of saving jobs: Without this mind-set we have a long struggle ahead.
Uchitelle, who reports on business, labor, and economics for The New York Times, was lead reporter for the series “The Downsizing of America,” which won the George Polk Award in 1996.
- Sara Grant