THE FUTURE OF SUCCESS
By Robert B. Reich
Knopf, 289 pages, $26
If there’s life outside work, you don’t know it. You are tired–bone tired. But you love your job, or so you think. Everyone else at work is also lashed to a schedule seemingly drawn up by a dungeon master, so you don’t feel so demoralized.
Log on here if this applies to you.
Actually, log on anyway, because you don’t have a choice: You are living in an American workplace where once-ironclad notions about how much time you spend on the job have been warped out of shape.
Once Robert Reich was caught up in the throes of a work-without-end lifestyle, lured to his office by the modern-day sirens of success that call out to millions of Americans to pour more of their precious days and lives into their jobs. But he escaped their embrace to realize that going home on time to his wife and kids is not a terrible workplace betrayal.
This book is the result of his flight from an incredibly demanding job as U.S. labor secretary through four years of the Clinton administration. It is not news that many American workers desperately lack rest and a private life. But Reich, now a professor at Brandeis University, is a brilliant and smooth synthesizer of details and trends so that the issue easily comes alive here.
His analysis is a little different, however. Unlike those who pin Americans’ voracious consumption of workplace hours on flaws in our cultural makeup, on rampant escapism from family or personal responsibilities, or on plotting by greedy businesses, he ascribes this trend largely to technology. And his moralizing about how job demands have displaced almost everything else in workers’ lives lacks some of the shrillness heard elsewhere.
Reich’s take on the economy at the start of the millennium is that most Americans have a very good deal. But there’s a price to pay for this “terrific deal,” as he calls it. We have shifted, he says, into a far more competitive economy where timeliness is more important than ever and swift, David-like businesses, armed with new technology and business savvy, topple slow-moving, one-time Goliaths.
It is a work world in which companies rely on two new workplace prototypes, whom Reich describes as the “geeks” and “shrinks.” Geeks, he explains, are dreamers–and not necessarily only in technological matters–who shape companies’ plans. Shrinks are rainmakers and marketers, people who perceive what the market wants and make sure that’s what it gets. They do their jobs in a workplace where loyalty no longer matters but performance surely does, and where lifetime jobs are a relic. Those who perform well can flit from company to company, promoting themselves along the way as they secure the best deals they can.
“Under the combined pressure, enterprises are becoming collections of people bound to one another by little more than temporary convenience,” he writes.
Driven by the marketplace’s crushing immediacy, Americans work hard. They put in more hours than their Japanese or European counterparts because, Reich suggests, they have so much more nowadays to gain financially. And because the job market is so tumultuous, they work hard to protect against a streak of bad luck. Not only do the well-to-do work harder to reap more, but the poor, who have fallen farther behind, must work harder just to stay in place.
The toll of these changes is felt by blue-collar workers whose pay has shrunk, forcing their wives into the job market so they can bolster their families’ finances. It is felt by families when workers cannot call a timeout from late-night meetings to be parents and spouses. And it is felt in communities where few have the time or energy for anything outside their own work-driven lives.
After reciting a long list of these and other despairing changes, Reich seems to run out of energy and insight when offering solutions. He runs through the kinds of personal changes that fill the highly popular self-help books–simplify your life, seek personal renewal–and suggests they may help somewhat. But they won’t really matter, he explains, as long as the nation’s workplaces are steaming along at full speed in the opposite direction.
What’s to be done?
The answer, he says, is not to pull the plug on America’s rip-roaring way of life, but rather to create protections and cushions for those hurt or pushed aside by it. One would be allowing employees to take their benefits with them so they can go on job-hopping but not suffer financially as they do. Another would be community insurance for places that suffer stiff job losses. He also suggests several steps for sharing wealth, including a $60,000 endowment for every 18-year-old to chart his or her future.
If the nation’s wealthy realize that a backlash by those cut off from the great abundance might force the system to collapse, Reich suggests, they might contribute to the drive to soften the growing economic gap between rich and poor. That smacks of pie-in-the-sky thinking, and it also runs counter to one of Reich’s themes–that businesses labeled as heartless and blamed for changes that wipe out jobs or shrink workers’ free time are simply responding to the demands of a very different and very competitive economy. They don’t deserve the criticism, he says, because they provide exactly what everyone wants: efficiency, technological change and heaping profits for all to share.
But it is hard to applaud companies that put blue-collar workers on 12-hour schedules because it is easier and cheaper to run factories around the clock, hospitals that exhaust overworked nurses because they do not want to expand their payrolls, or companies that wipe out jobs and then dump added burdens on the workplace survivors. These are not corporate pioneers. They are thieves who steal workers’ time.
Rather than indicting technology as the leading cause for a generation of workaholics, there seems to be something else, something in our genes, that allows this to take place, something that finds gratification in the idea of endless work and lets us swallow the endless demands for services without calling it quits.
We are driven by our machinery and technology, but also because of who we are. Reich heard the call to endless work, answered it, and then closed his ears to it so he could walk away. It is a tribute that he took such a step, and a tribute that he now wants the rest of us to consider the dangers.
If we want to follow in Reich’s footsteps, we have to be sure what we are turning our backs on. Are we rejecting something within ourselves or within our workplace? We will never really make a break if we don’t know what we’re putting behind us.
