Pooh-poohing populist discontent.

• Author: Douglas, Susan
• Position: Mass media and corporate responsibility - Column

Like any self-respecting neurotic, I hate to fly. To get through it, I mainline trash magazines from take-off to landing. So imagine my surprise when - at 30,000 feet - I looked at the table of contents of Glamour to discover the following article: "Sweatshops: Fashion's Dirty Little Secret."

Although much of the article amounted to a puff piece about how companies like Liz Claiborne and the Gap have cleaned up their act and no longer rely on child labor, the story nonetheless urged its readers to look for the union label. It even showcased polls demonstrating that consumers would boycott companies suspected of using sweatshops.

Now, I can't imagine George Will reading Glamour, but he did seem especially agitated over this kind of journalism, which suggests that "it is the job of the corporation to be a mini-welfare state," as he said on This Week With David Brinkley. Will is sick of all this recent prattling about the socially responsible corporation, the export of jobs abroad, and worker insecurity. Why, statistics just don't support the notion that workers should be anxious at all, Will pleaded. Most laid-off workers find jobs at the same or better pay than what they had before, he insisted. "The trajectory of the last week, the last month, the last 200 years, is this," and then we saw his hand zooming up as if it were an L-1011. "Everyone should relax: It's going up."

Will aimed his barbs at The New York Times, which ran a seven-part, front-page, blockbuster series on downsizing in America. "The elite press has so magnified this issue," he puffed. If people are insecure, asked Will, why do 80 percent of them respond positively to the pollster's question, "Are you happy?" David Brinkley had the answer. "What we're saying is that people are having a terrible time, and they love it," he chuckled.

The Times series, by the way, showed that since 1979, 18.7 million white-collar jobs have been lost. Yes, new jobs have been created, "but more often than not, people who lose a full-time job get a new one that pays less than the old or is only part-time."

Blue-collar workers, of course, have really been screwed, but even among college-educated workers over fifty, the layoff rate has doubled from the 1980s to the 1990s. Not to worry. Just relax and enjoy yourselves.

This Week did an entire show on the GM strike, but only as a means of further pooh-poohing populist discontent. The show linked the strike to Buchanan's success in tapping into...