Working blues in booming economy
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — For more than two decades, Ken White worked at a credit card processor. It was a good job, but it fell victim to the Great Recession.
Today, at 56, White does similar work managing technology projects for a regional bank. And yet everything feels different. He is a contractor for a technology services firm that assigns him to the bank. He is paid less, and the bonuses and stock awards he once earned as a full-fledged employee are long gone.
For all the U.S. economy’s robust job growth, White and many like him don’t feel much like beneficiaries of what is now the longest expansion on record. The kinds of jobs they once enjoyed — permanent positions, with stability, bonuses, pensions, benefits and opportunities to move up — are
now rarer.
“It’s not as easy as it was,” White said.
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 and GSS staff finds more people saying work has grown more demanding. Around 1 in 3 American workers said they face too much work to do everything well. About 1 in 5 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.
A Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis analysis found corporate profits have far outpaced employee compensation since the early 2000s.
Paul Nota has worked at CVS in Massachusetts since 2002 in several roles: technician, supervisor, assistant manager. He likes CVS and still works there part time. But he’s noticed a change from earlier days, when he felt CVS “thought of the employee first” — with small appreciations such as company barbecues.
Those gestures are mainly gone, he said, while the company asks for more.
Nota, 32, juggles helping people in line, answering calls and handling the drive-thru. He said they’ve been told they could soon be giving flu shots but notes they won’t get extra pay.
CVS spokesman Mike DeAngelis said the company has made workflows more efficient with tools such as new phone technology. CVS last year raised minimum starting pay to $11 an hour and stepped up pay raises. DeAngelis said turnover among pharmacy technicians has declined.
Another trend that has disrupted life for some workers is when companies outsource jobs not central to their business.
Companies looking 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 and a former Obama administration official.
Weil’s 2014 book “The Fissured Workplace” documented how companies hire outside firms to do work formerly done in-house. These companies hire people at lower pay with fewer benefits and job protections and in some cases outsource work to other companies. Sometimes, workers are hired as contractors, who are technically selfemployed even though they report to the same workplace.