White-Collar Blues. - White Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and Its Rewards in Corporate America by Jill Andresky Fraser - book review

A study of America's managing class finds things are tough all over.

White Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and Its Rewards in Corporate America by Jill Andresky Fraser (Norton, $26.95)

If Intel and Cisco are expecting their slenderized workforces to labor with unswerving loyalty to pull them through the current slump, they may be in for a rude awakening. And for new-economy refugees seeking stability in the fusty corporations they once scorned, the awakening may be ruder still.

Or so one might assume after reading Jill Andresky Fraser's timely, if flawed, new book, White Collar Sweatshop, in which the author equates the lot of U.S. corporate employees to that of desperate people toiling in sweatshops around the world. Hyperbole, your queen has come.

Fraser, a longtime finance reporter and editor, acknowledges that the comparison will seem "implausible -- perhaps even offensive" to many. I know my heart failed to bleed for the man who was forced to downsize from a four-bedroom colonial on two acres in Connecticut because his raise wasn't as large as he expected. Fraser caps out on any extended defense of the sweatshop analogy. But she makes a largely persuasive argument that many changes wrought by the "lean and mean" management ethos of the past two decades have resulted in genuinely exploitative work environments at every level below the executive suite.

The ever-expanding American workday has been amply covered elsewhere, and Fraser doesn't add much that's new. Her history of once-bountiful benefits packages is nostalgia-inducing. But it's her scathing analysis of contemporary management practices that packs the biggest punch. Fraser describes the depressing effects of layoffs, poorly managed mergers and paychecks that barely keep up with inflation. Here's a fun fact: Between 1989 and 1997, a peak year for corporate profits, inflation-adjusted wages for new college graduates declined 6.5 percent for men and 74 percent for women.

In a chapter called "Raising the Bar," Fraser singles out Intel as one of the tech world's prime white-collar sweatshops, citing the company's constantly rising workloads, its habit of pushing out experienced employees to keep down payroll costs, and its punitive, inflexible employee review system. One former manager explains that during his tenure he was expected to have as many below-average as above-average workers so that the brass could "have a nice bell curve."

There's more to the culture of overwork and diminishing returns than corporate inhumanity, though, and Fraser doesn't do justice to the complexity of the phenomenon. For example, she cites sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild's 1997 book The Time Bind in support of her assertion that even companies that have "family friendly" policies often subtly discourage their use, but she fails to note the book's provocative central thesis -- that employees at the company Hochschild studied worked long hours not because of company demands, but because they preferred their work lives to their home lives.

Such lack of nuance may stem partly from the nature of Fraser's research. The studies she cites are generally broad averages that don't reveal differences between industries and employee categories. And the people she interviewed were self-selected, many of them recruited through Internet kvetch sites.

Fraser greets the complaints of those disgruntled workers perhaps too uncritically, but today's white-collar workforce is unquestionably more cynical than the one that carried firms through the tumultuous '70s. "When business leaders learn how much it can cost, in tough times, to buy a substitute for employee loyalty, they may learn to regret its absence," Fraser warns. She believes corporations are about to pay a steep price for lean and mean management. We'll soon learn if she is right.

Sandra Stewart is a writer in San Francisco.

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