The book of jobs: a patient account of the pain of layoffs.

• Author: Kusnet, David
• Position: Book review

The Disposable American By Louis Uchitelle Alfred A. Knopf, $26.00

Among all the reporters who write about economics for the mainstream media, Louis Uchitelle is the indispensable iconoclast who covers corporate chief executives critically and working people sympathetically. If he seems like a throwback to an era when members of the working press identified with other working stiffs, that's because he remembers an American economy where workers expected that, if they did their work well and their employers prospered, their jobs would not be in jeopardy. He was hired as a reporter for the Associated Press in 1957, and, soon afterwards, became a "permanent" employee, with "paid vacations, health insurance, overtime pay, a pension plan, [and] annual wage increases" under the AP's union contract with the Newspaper Guild. Joining The New York Times in 1980, he brought his memories of an economy where, as he now recalls, "job security was tangible, so tangible that it could be conferred on people, and it was."

For much of his career, Uchitelle has covered the casualties of the transition to the new economy. In 1996, he was the lead writer and reporter for a six-part Times series on "The Downsizing of America," which reported that more than 43 million jobs had been wiped out in the United States between 1979 and 1995. This spring, his first book, The Disposable American, appeared, expanding on his series, describing how massive layoffs hurt individual workers, their families, their companies and their communities.

The Disposable American is a good book about an important topic. Uchitelle tells the stories of layoffs with sympathy for the victims and outrage at their suffering. He convincingly makes the case that massive layoffs are usually self-defeating and should be undertaken only as a last resort. But not every workplace abuse can be viewed through the lens of layoffs, as Uchitelle seems to do here. The author offers only a sketchy explanation of how and why modern job-shedding emerged, and he doesn't explore when it might be justifiable. Nor does he devote much attention to the aftermath of layoffs: the challenge of creating new jobs that provide good pay, benefits, and opportunities. Because Uchitelle concentrates almost exclusively on protecting existing jobs, he dismisses the idea of preparing workers for new and better jobs, and he displays an inexplicable animus against the Clinton administration whose economic strategy laid a heavy emphasis on job creation, as well as education and re-training. (Full disclosure: I served as a speechwriter for President Clinton from 1992-1994.)

In spite of these shortcomings, The Disposable American is essential reading, especially for its engrossing and enlightening accounts of mass layoffs at several companies. One story is that of Stanley Works, a hardware manufacturer, that once was the largest employer in New Britain, Conn. When competition from low-wage countries first cut into Stanley's sales in the late 1970s, the company tried to trim its payroll by freezing the hiring of white-collar employees. Stanley's original management began to lay off blue-collar workers only after long and painful talks with the workers' union and civic leaders. The company's chief executive Donald W. Davis is a sympathetic figure, someone with deep roots in New Britain, and was clearly anguished about the layoffs.

But when Stanley failed to make a comeback, the board of directors...