Zachary was an unlikely proponent of unionization.  By the time I interviewed him a year and a half ago, he had spent nearly two decades at Citigroup, working his way up the ladder in a variety of financial and midmanagement positions.  He had survived layoffs and other cutbacks, seven-day workweeks, and years of doing “11 P.M. phone calls to Asia and 6 A.M. calls to Europe” and making “extraordinary, Herculean efforts whenever the bank needed . . . that.”[1]

            Yet by the end of the 1990s, during a series of conversations about his career, his employer, and the state of his industry, Zachary predicted to me that “within the next five years, the entire financial services sector will be unionized.   There’s apparently no other way out,” he added, as he described a pattern of excessive and unrealistic employer demands, mounting stress and insecurity among employees of all ranks, and what he called “the takeaways, which combine to make you feel emotionally as though you’re an interchangeable part of the corporation—just another commodity.”

            He paused, then concluded, “The funny thing is, for many years, the reason why benefits and working conditions were so good at financial-services companies was because employers were afraid of unions coming in.   Now they’re creating the kind of conditions that will encourage that by cutting people’s retirement benefits, scaling back medical benefits, and all the while pressuring you to do the ‘24/7’ work thing.”

            Welcome to today’s white-collar workplace.  Its computer programmers, salespeople, administrative workers, engineers, telemarketers, financial staffers, telecommuters, junior trainees and yes, even midlevel managers are exhausted, financially and emotionally stressed out, and in many cases, mad as hell about a variety of trends that have worsened their work and home lives despite nearly two decades of unparalleled corporate and stock-market prosperity. 

            The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) stopped using the phrase “white-collar” in 1982, when it changed its job-category terminology.  But even without the label, this sector has become an increasingly large portion of the workforce.  Eighteen years ago, there were 53,470,000 white-collar workers, who represented 53.7 percent of the labor force.   By 1999, that had climbed to 59.5 percent of a total of 133,488,000 workers.   This included 40,467,000 men and women who fell into the BLS’s managerial and professional specialty categories, and 38,921,000 people in technical, sales, and administrative support positions. [2]

            Earlier boom periods in post–World War II America raised the quality of life for white-collar staffers in a variety of measurable ways:  by reducing people’s work hours and increasing leisure-time opportunities; by creating progressively stronger safety nets of  health-care insurance and retirement pensions;  by improving vacation and sick-day policies; and eventually, by broadening corporate benefit packages to include valuable extras such as mental-health insurance, dental coverage, and education-reimbursement plans.

            But the past two decades of prosperity have rewarded people primarily through rising stock prices—a trend that has had little impact on the day-to-day lives of most white-collar Americans (who tend to hold stock, if they do at all, in small retirement savings accounts).  What about all those gold-plated stock options that attracted so much media attention, especially during the late 1990s?  Setting euphoria aside,  “Microsoft Millionaires” (the popular term for rank and filers who have made their fortune through stock-related compensation) have proven to be few and far between.  According to the BSL, only 2.4 percent of private U.S. employers reward their staffers with stock or options; most of these plans are confined to executives only. For the rest of the white-collar workforce, the tradeoff for a stock-oriented economic rebound from the doldrums of the late 1970s and early 1980s has been worsening employee benefits, lagging salaries, and increasing loads of work, stress, and insecurity. [3]

            Contrary to what one might expect, these workplace conditions have not deteriorated despite the recent business boom—they’ve deteriorated because of it.  In industry after industry throughout the 1990s, corporate bottom lines (and stock prices) thrived in large part because companies were able to cut their operating costs through periodic layoffs, benefit cutbacks, salary freezes and reductions, and ever-increasing productivity demands on their workforces. 

            Human-resource-related cutbacks flourished, no matter how good the good times got.  Thus, for example, during 1998—by any measure a stellar year for the U.S. economy—large corporations laid off more than 677,000 staffers across the nation.  One out of every five of those jobs was lost within a high-tech employer, despite the fact that technology was among the strongest and fastest-growing sectors of the economy. [4]

            Whatever the industry, layoffs usually translated into heavier and heavier workloads for those staffers who managed to hang onto their increasingly precarious posts. “Men and women come in all the time, begging for help, more and more stressed out,” confided Zoe, a human resources officer who had survived numerous reduction rounds at Levi Strauss.  “I’d say the average person is now doing the job of two and a half people.”  At one publishing company, an editing staffer—who already was taking work home with her nights and weekends—told me that she had actually begged to be included in a cutback, since the alternative meant taking on all the responsibilities and job tasks that previously had been performed by three different people.

            But layoffs were far from the only problem confronting the employees of

cutback-crazy corporate America.  BankAmerica, BellAtlantic, and IBM were among dozens of large and healthy companies that made the decision during the late nineties to downgrade their staffers from traditional pensions to so-called cash-balance plans, which exacted huge savings (in IBM’s case alone, they were projected at $200 million annually) at the expense of older and longer-tenured employees whose retirement benefits were decimated by the switch.   Other large employers adopted complex amendments to traditional plans—which were often poorly understood by the working men and women whose pension benefits were cut as a result of “adjusted pension multipliers,” rewritten “compensation definitions,” or altered calculations of “final average pay.”  

            The lean-and-mean management philosophies espoused by America’s business leaders during this era left no room for regrets.  In his bestselling book Only the Paranoid Survive, Andrew Grove, then the chief executive of Intel, wrote, “Who knows what your job will look like after cataclysmic change? . . .  Who knows if your job will even exist and, frankly, who will care besides you?” [5]   George Bailey, a management consultant, warned in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, “Positive motivation is never sufficient to achieve transformational change. . .   The workplace is never free of fear—and it shouldn’t be.  Indeed, fear can be a powerful management tool.” [6] Little wonder that people like Zachary came to feel like “interchangeable commodities.”      

            During record years of corporate prosperity, here’s the financial reality that confronted most working families.  Salaries lagged behind inflation for most of the 1990s.  Financial pressures were particularly pronounced for white-collar males: the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) calculated that they earned an average hourly wage of $19.24 in 1997—a grand total of six cents more (in inflation-adjusted dollars)  than they had earned in 1973.  Much of their financial decline took place during the boom years of 1989 and 1997:  Between 1989 and 1997 males experienced wage deterioration in almost every white-collar job category that the EPI analyzed, including administrative and clerical (-4.8 percent); sales (-2.1 percent) technical (-0.4 percent); and managers (-0.3 percent).   Although female white-collar workers fared better, averaging a 5.5 percent salary increase from 1989 to 1997, some categories also experienced a decline:  administrative and clerical workers (-1.6 percent) and technical staffers (-0.6 percent). [7] 

            Meanwhile, young people also faced tremendous difficulties.  Except for those fortunate few who left colleges and graduate schools for careers in management consulting, the then-thriving “dot.com” world, or Wall Street, full-time-employment pickings were slim and salaries were tight.  On an inflation-adjusted basis, new college graduates in 1997 actually earned $1.17 per hour less their counterparts had twenty-five years earlier.    

            Tightening the financial squeeze for many white-collar men and women, their health-insurance coverage has steadily deteriorated and in some cases has disappeared entirely.  In 1980, virtually everyone who worked for a large corporation received coverage through an employer-sponsored plan; by 1995, one of every four employees did not.  Most of the companies that continued to provide coverage downgraded its quality while requiring their staffers to shoulder a larger share of its cost.  The downward spiral for retirement benefits has been equally pronounced.  In 1980, 84 percent of the men and women working for large employers were covered by so-called defined-benefit plans, which paid them a guaranteed pension upon retirement.  Fifteen years later, only 52 percent were covered. [8]

            While the rewards of work have diminished for corporate employees in these and other important measures, the demands of the workplace have relentlessly increased. To keep up, people have had to work longer and harder—so hard, in fact, that one recent survey revealed that 40 percent were too busy at the office to take a lunch break.  More than twenty five million Americans, or just about one-fifth of the workforce, spend more than forty nine hours each week at the office.  Nearly eleven million of those men and women spend more than twelve hours a day tied to their desks.

            And for many people, that’s the beginning, not the end, of their workweeks.  In a business world in which GE’s Jack Welch offered a vision of “endless juice” to be squeezed from the corporate “lemon” (so long as CEOs adhered to ever-increasing productivity standards for their employees), [9] white-collar men and women in industries across the country have found themselves forced to bring their endless workloads home with them, to be whittled away at during commutes, after putting the kids to sleep, or during weekends, holidays, or even vacations.  Overwork has become such a

pervasive—indeed, accepted—part of our culture that  Miami’s ritzy Delano Hotel has set up a desk and chair at the shallow end of its swimming pool.  They’re usually occupied.

            During four years of research, I interviewed more than 100 men and women who worked in a wide range of jobs and industries.  Many reported being overwhelmed, exhausted, or demoralized by the effort to juggle the seemingly insatiable demands of their employers with the challenges of family life.  Robert, a thirty-two-year-old financial professional at American Express, described his working conditions :  “I don’t get home until 9:30 some nights.  I’m dead tired 90 percent of the time.  I think it’s slowly sinking in with my wife about the idea that we’re going to have to do something with Robert’s life.”

            Catherine, a marketing staffer who put in sixteen-hour days at IBM, interspersed with frequent out-of-state business trips, told me about what she and her husband called calendar coordination.  “He was traveling too.  So we’d sit down at dinner together every two weeks and compare our calendars to figure our where he would be and where I would be every single day.”  With no time to exercise and a workload so heavy that she brought it home with her every single night, she lived with incessant backaches and an inability to become pregnant, both of which she blamed on her job stresses.  “It was like you didn’t have a home life.  IBM gave you a computer at home.  That made it easy to work.”  

            In fact, rather than making our worklives more manageable, new technologies have facilitated many of the overwork trends that now plague corporate America, by making the office increasingly inescapable for anyone who owns a cell phone, pager, personal computer, or fax machine.  “Tickler,” who visited an Internet chat room that I set up to explore the impact of all these workplace gadgets on our work and home lives, told me, “I had two phone lines (local and toll free) at home, two voice mails, e-mail, and the rest . . . (and) was besieged with the usual crap of being assaulted during the evenings, nights, weekends, and the like.”

            Many of the men and women I spoke to made similar complaints about work’s invasion into their once-inviolate personal space.  Recent studies have borne them out.  A whopping seven million people regularly check work-related e-mails while outside the office.  About two-thirds of the white-collar workforce maintain contact with the office during vacations, in many cases by lugging a laptop and cell phone along.  Many people consider this a form of self-defense.  After all, with more than two-hundred work-related messages, on average, bombarding corporate employees, every day (whether from e-mails, faxes, letters, or telephone calls), there’s no way to keep up with the job demands, unless people take them home.

            Yet the invasion of home lives by the office brings with it plenty of new stresses.    Marc, who worked in the public relations department of a large New York City corporation, told me about a Saturday morning breakfast that he had tried to have, with his toddler-aged daughter, at a local delicatessen.  “There we were in the mall and my beeper goes off.  Here I am.  My daughter deserves my attention, but all of a sudden, Marc is a husband, a father, and an employee, all at the same time.”  He paused, then added, “But that’s not right, because when I’m at the office, they don’t want to hear that I’m also Marc, a father, and Marc, a husband.”

            In an environment in which cutback-obsessed corporations have managed to find millions—and sometimes billions—of dollars to spend on mergers and acquisitions, globalization campaigns, and oversized executive-compensation packages, it’s not surprising that workplace frustrations have been percolating among women and men of all ages and rungs of the corporate ladder.  Veterans of today’s corporate world know all too well that—no matter how much work they’ve put in inside and outside the office—they face increased chances of losing their jobs once they reach their forties and fifties, or achieve higher salary levels, or find themselves in the unfortunate position of watching their employers negotiate mergers, which inevitably are followed, these days, by massive cutbacks. (After the Exxon–Mobil deal was announced, one newspaper headline quipped, “For Oil Workers, Merger Is Just Another Word for More Layoffs.”) [10] 

            Even in a low-unemployment economy, their prospects after a layoff are bleak.  According to the Department of Labor, which has surveyed what it calls worker “displacement” since 1981, layoff victims average paycuts of 9.5 percent in their next employment. Among those people who lost full-time jobs between 1995 and 1997, 12.2 pecent of them experienced a wage drop of 20 percent or more when they next found full-time employment.  Some types of workers have proven to be especially vulnerable:  13.1 percent of administrative and clerical workers experienced a 20% or greater wage decline; as did 12.5 percent of sales staffers. [11]  

            Meanwhile, at the other end of the age spectrum, I’ve encountered young people who are confused and enraged by their inability to find good, full-time, entry-level jobs with promotion potential among cost-conscious employers who prefer to rely on contingent labor that can be cut-and-pasted to fit each quarter’s demands. “I hated being contingent because of the feeling of insecurity.  It didn’t feel like I was a solid provider,” Patrick told me. “I felt like I never had a future.” As a twenty-something he spent a year and a half working, through a temporary manpower agency, in a back-office administrative position at Intel.  “Had no medical benefits.  I earned less than eight dollars an hour.  I worked from 7:00 in the morning until 4:30 in the afternoon,” he reported.  “Things like overtime would look good, so I did it.”           

            Patrick’s goal was to get hired by Intel for a full-time position that would bring with it benefits and a greater measure of security.  But progress was painfully slow.  When he finally got hired, it was only as an Intel, rather than agency, temp: “I was an ‘ICE,’ for ‘Intel Contract Employee.’  I was under six-months review.  ‘We’ll decide if we like you.’  That was when the pressure on me really increased.”

            During the late 1990s, about 30 percent of the 5.6 million Americans working in contingent jobs were under the age of twenty-five.  Nearly half of those young people surveyed told the BLS that they would have preferred noncontingent work if they could have found it.[12] That’s not too surprising.  “Beejay,” whom I first encountered in an Internet chat room, complained about her life as a temporary employee for IBM:  “I would like the perks of being a permanent employee—the medical benefits, increasing vacation time, sick days, personal holidays, 401K, and the promotions.  But it doesn’t matter how excellent your work is or how competently you handle your position—it will always be a permanent/temporary job.  This company, like all other global companies, worships at the altar of outsourcing.”

            One recent survey found that three-quarters of the nation’s large employers use contingent staffers, at usage levels that had increased for most of them during the past five years.[13]  The Conference Board, which studied this trend, found that corporate motivations vary, but “where benefit packages for core employees are very rich, as at Mary Kay Cosmetics, avoiding such expenses can be a very attractive feature of a contingent work force.”  Reliance on contingent labor is also “closely identified with continued downsizing,” according to the Conference Board, “since headcount restrictions are often imposed on managers to keep the core employment down once the job cuts have been made.” [14] 

            But young people are far from the only white-collar employees to be affected, as corporate America’s switch to contingent labor has crossed industry, job, and age boundaries.  According to the BLS upscale “professional-specialty” jobs logged the same high percentage of contingent employment in 1998—about 6 percent—as those presumably less-skilled positions within the “administrative support, including clerical” category. 

            Brian, a software engineer who had once worked for Hewlett-Packard, epitomized the trend.  After losing his full-time post during a companywide cutback, he had been forced to rely on short-term consulting jobs.  “It’s absolutely stupefying to watch the industry changes going on,” he told me.  “Seventy-five to 80 percent of the engineers where I work are consultants.  Their average lifetime—three months.  The policy:  ‘Just finish the task and get out.’  These changes are turning the workplace into an unending survival exercise.” 

            At age forty-three, Brian worried that he was simply “too old” to get hired for a full-time job in what was known as a “young man’s” business.  “In this industry, there’s a tremendous fascination with twenty-year-olds.  There’s a saying here: If you’re in your thirties, you’re expendable; if you’re in your forties, you’re unhireable.” Forced to pay for his own health insurance, unable to save for retirement, anxious about his family’s

longer-term financial security, Brian took on as many consulting projects as he could get, no matter how hard that required him to work.  “My life for the past several years has often literally consisted of going home and picking up the newspaper with the sun coming up.  Six-month stretches of working six or seven days a week, with my average workday eighteen hours long.”

            To those who remain dubious about widespread workplace deterioration and discontent, abundant evidence is just a mouse click away.  Throughout the Internet, Web sites abound in which disgruntled employees air their grievances, swap workplace survival strategies, and, in some cases, do a decent job of mimicking the grassroots organizational efforts much more closely associated in the past with blue-collar unions than with white-collar staffers.  Amidst sites that include faceintel.com (in which former and current employees of Intel highlight their allegations of abusive workplace practices), nynexsucks.com (which drew active complaints from employees even after the telecommunications company merged with BellAtlantic and changed its name), and walkingwounded.com (which speaks for itself), “The IBM Pension Club” (at http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/ibmpension) is well worth a visit.

            The IBM site was set up and launched by an employee in May 1999 after the company announced its plans to downgrade its pension to a so-called cash-balance plan.    In a remarkable testament to the power of the Internet, the site managed to attract fifteen thousand “hits” from visitors each day, within less than three weeks of operation.  “Crime of the century!” one e-mail sender practically screamed off the page.  Another visitor wrote, “There is no fog, just a thick blanket of bullshit.  They are shafting us, the numbers speak for themselves.  Wake up everyone, we should be angry.”

            Indeed, that’s the point.  After nearly two decades in which white-collar workers have failed to share the benefits of  business prosperity, more and more people are waking up.  And that creates unparalleled opportunities in a traditionally individualistic segment of the workforce to begin mobilizing people to resist corporate management practices of overwork and underreward. Some unions have been quick to respond.  The Communications Workers of America (CWA), for example, hyperlinked its own Web site to that of  IBM’s disgruntled employees and launched an electronic survey of work hours and other conditions at the company.

            Very few of the people that I interviewed belonged to a union.  (That’s not too surprising, since only 2.5 percent of white-collar workers are in unions, compared with 13.9 percent of the overall workforce.)  But those who worked for companies that also employed union members were well aware—if still a little shocked by their

recognition—that they have proven to be far more vulnerable, during the past two decades of cutbacks, than their blue-collar colleagues have been.  This pattern has repeated itself in one industry after another, most especially on the benefit front.  Thus, for example, when AT&T and Southern New England Telephone made big changes in their retirement plans, union members typically retained their traditional pensions while others were forced to switch to less desirable new plans.   

            This dynamic can clearly work in the union movement’s favor.  Last year’s successful forty-day strike by fifteen-thousand professionals at  Boeing provides the most telling evidence to date that white-collar men and women can be motivated to organize and resist cutbacks, as they come to recognize that they have lost their once-privileged status within the corporate workplace.  The achievements won last March at

Boeing—including raises averaging 15 percent over three years and elimination of planned health-care insurance reductions—point to the rallying potential of salary- and benefit-oriented campaigns among this segment of the workforce. [15] 

            Some of the unions seeking to make inroads here have shrewdly decided to exploit employee discontent over the outrageous executive compensation packages that have so often coincided with human-resource-related cutbacks at large corporations during the 1990s.  (Remember Zachary, from Citigroup?  He told me that Sandy Weill was “the voodoo doll” for dissatisfied employees, in part because of his $167 million compensation package during the same year that the bank announced plans to cut 5 percent of its workforce and reduce a wide range of benefits.)  Along these lines, the AFL-CIO has created an Internet site that not only lists CEO compensation at a wide range of companies but also has instructions to help Web surfers figure out how to complain to corporate directors and file proxy resolutions that challenge pay levels in the executive suite. 

            There are other issues that also could motivate white-collar groups to mobilize.  In a segment of the workforce that has typically been preoccupied with job and financial security, contingent employment (whether it happens to entry-level workers, layoff victims, or people deemed too old by youth-obsessed employers) brings with it a host of difficulties, all worth organizing around. 

            The recent success of Microsoft’s long-term temporary workers (the so-called permatemps) in winning a $97 million settlement of their battle for foregone benefits will likely spawn copycat suits; WashTech, a CWA affiliate, helped support their  class-action lawsuit as part of a larger effort to start organizing within Microsoft.  Meanwhile, in California’s Silicon Valley, the AFL-CIO has set up an association (some have compared it to a fledgling union) that aims to help temporary workers—among them, secretaries, clerks, bookkeepers, and software testers—meet, air their grievances, and share workplace strategies. [16]

            The other hot-button issue worth focusing on among white-collar staffers is

time—or rather, their lack of it—outside the world of work.  At etown.com, an Internet company that won the distinction in January of being the first dot.com to experience a union vote (when thirteen customer service representatives decided whether to join the CWA), a key issue was the company’s requirement that staffers put in frequent overtime.  

            One rallying point for this campaign might be the “Free Time/Free People” statement that was developed last year by a network of religious and secular intellectuals as well as labor activists; it was endorsed at last July’s meeting of Jobs with Justice.  Among its proposals are a compulsory limit of no more than five hours of overtime each week (accompanied by days off or reduced workdays on Fridays); paid leave for family and community service for all employees; and a sabbatical year of paid Social Security, to be available to any person between the ages of forty-five and fifty-five who would be willing to delay one year of future retirement benefits. [17] 

             Although there are plenty of issues worth rallying around within corporations that have become breeding grounds for white-collar discontent, organizers still, however, face a number of significant obstacles.  Historical resistance remains powerful, especially among the traditionally higher-paid professional job categories in which most people don’t even think about the possibility of unions making a difference in their own lives.  If anything, a number of the people I interviewed were explicitly antagonistic to unions, either because they still identified more with management than with blue-collar employees, or because they resented the ways that unions had been able to shelter some women and men, but not them, from corporate cutbacks. 

            The current economic downturn, meanwhile, has proven so far to be a two-edged sword for unions:  Although there have been some signs of interest (especially among disaffected workers at struggling tech companies where stock options have become worthless), layoffs and corporate bankruptcies have cut off most of these at an early stage. Given the difficulties presented by the changing political scene and the abundance of other organizing priorities still on the table, it seems likely that unions will keep their white-collar efforts focused on the lowest ranks of the ladder, particularly on technical, administrative, and contingent staffers.  If they can make significant inroads into key companies or industries—especially in the highly visible technology sector—this might help facilitate later, expanded activities.      

            Are we at the beginning of a new and hopefully more promising era of white-collar organizing?  It’s too early to tell.  But one thing is clear:  After nearly two decades in which corporate prosperity has translated itself into deteriorating workplace conditions for countless people, the potential is there.