Going bust in a booming economy
Workers say jobs aren’t what they used to be
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Ken White had a good job at a credit card processor for 22 years, but he was laid off in the Great Recession.
Today, at 56, White does similar work. Yet everything feels different. He’s a contractor for a technology services firm that assigns him to manage tech projects for a regional bank. He’s paid just two-thirds of his old salary. The bonuses and stock awards he once earned are gone.
Despite the U.S. economy’s job growth, White and others like him don’t feel like beneficiaries of the longest expansion on record. The kinds of jobs they once enjoyed — permanent positions, with bonuses and opportunities to move up — are now rarer.
“It’s not as easy as it was,” White says.
White’s evolution from employee to contractor is emblematic of a trend in the American workplace: The economy keeps growing. Unemployment is at a half-century low. Yet many people feel their jobs have been devalued by employers that increasingly prioritize shareholders and customers. Economic research, government data and interviews with workers sketch a picture of lagging wages, eroding benefits and demands for employees to do more without more pay. Experts say a confluence of forces are at play: globalization, workplace automation, a decline of labor unions, fiercer price competition and outsourcing.
“We’ve made decisions and baked into the structure this extreme inequality,” said Barbara Dyer of the Good Companies, Good Jobs Initiative at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
A collaborative analysis of the 2018 General Social Survey by The AP-NORC Center finds more people saying work has grown more demanding. Around one in three American workers said they face too much work to do everything well. About one in five held a job other than their main one. About three-quarters had to work extra hours beyond their usual schedule at least once a month. Those numbers are up from 2006.
Companies looking to “to get out of the messy job of employing people” shed janitors, security guards or tech support, said David Weil, dean of the Heller School of Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University.
Weil’s 2014 book “The Fissured Workplace” found contractors hire people at lower pay with fewer benefits and job protections and in some cases outsource work to still other companies. Sometimes, workers are hired as contractors, who are technically self-employed even though they report to the same workplace.