THE NINETIES -- The Downsizing Decade.

RAYMOND GOZZI, JR. [*]

WITH ALL THE EXCITEMENT and apprehension over the Millennium change, the decade of the 1990s has received little attention. There are no generally agreed-upon themes, icons, or nicknames for the decade. This is partly because it has been a somewhat formless time. Part of it was spent waiting for the new Millennium, the Y2K problem being the technological equivalent of the end-of-the-world expectations of Medieval Europeans as the year 1000 approached.

In 1993 I wrote an ETC article, "The Nineties -- an Empty Metaphor Waiting to be Filled." It has been twice reprinted elsewhere, but I have seen no reason to change the basic premise of the title -- there has been no "defining moment" or unifying theme to this decade.

This formless quality of the decade was illustrated well in a vote taken by the U.S. Postal Service in 1999 to determine the subjects of stamps to commemorate the decade. First place went to cellular phones, with about 214,000 votes. Second place went to the movie "Titanic," with 210,000 votes. Third place was "recovering species," 193,000 votes. (Schmid, 1999.)

As I write this, it is Summer, 1999, and we're running out of time for defining moments. So I will concentrate on two themes which I think come closest to defining the decade of the Nineties. First, I will consider "The Tabloid Decade," as proposed by David Kamp in the February, 1999, Vanity Fair. Then I will turn to my personal choice -- the Downsizing Decade.

In "The Tabloid Decade" David Kamp makes a strong case for the tabloidization of United States culture during the Nineties. In this period, sensationalist tabloid content went mainstream, as network news anchors and respectable newspapers went head to head with the supermarket tabloids to cover scandalous stories. Kamp sees the Tabloid Nineties as set apart from earlier decades by two factors: advanced technology and increased vulgarity.

Just a list of the decade's tabloid-like stories which made it into mainstream media is sobering. These stories made their splash, often providing several weeks worth of titillating revelations, before settling into the inevitable oblivion of satiation. Kamp dates the beginning of the Tabloid Decade with the 1991 arrest of Pee-Wee Herman, a children's television character, in an adult theater in Florida. This is when the carnival-like coverage began, producing a stream of follow-up stories, psychologists' opinions, and barroom jokes around the country.

That autumn, the Clarence Thomas hearings took place, with their he-said she-said drama of national network testimony. Then came the William Kennedy Smith trial, Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco, Lorena and John Wayne Bobbitt, Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly, Gennifer Flowers, the Menendez Brothers trials, Hollywood Madam Heidi Fleiss, the Rodney King videotape, Woody Allen's marital difficulties, Kurt Cobain's suicide.

This only brings us to mid-decade, where we got the O. J. Simpson murder case, which lasted longer and took up more media attention than any other event, with the possible exception of the Starr Report's protracted revelations about Bill and Monica (and others).

The second half of the decade featured the deaths of Princess Diana, JonBenet Ramsey, the Heaven's Gate cult, and seventeen students and one teacher at Colombine High School in Colorado. Into this sensationalistic stew, add major violence in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Waco, and Oklahoma City.

The only problem I have with the "Tabloid Decade" metaphor is that it remains focused entirely on the media, and media representations of events in the decade. As Kraft notes, "...you can't help but wonder what's been lurking the whole time in that ignored parallel universe known as reality" (p.75). This is a good point, and one of the things that "reality" offered up was a corporate mania for "downsizing." Perhaps this is the unsavory reality which the sensationalistic media images were meant to divert us from.

The word "downsize" entered the language in the mid-1970s, referring to smaller cars and houses, as the nation adjusted to the suddenly higher prices for oil and gas. By the Nineties, it had come to refer to people, "displaced workers" as the Department of Labor called them.

It is notoriously difficult to get accurate statistics on downsizing. Sociologist Richard Sennett (1998, p.49) scanned the literature covering 1980-1995, and found a low estimate of 13 million workers, and a high estimate of 39 million. Statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor show from 1992 through 1997, 16.4 million people lost their jobs to permanent layoffs, a higher rate than in the 1980s (Uchitelle, Aug. 20, 1998). During these years one out of every 12 to 15 workers was downsized.

While millions of workers were losing their jobs, corporate profits were climbing, stock values were rising, and the salaries of U.S. corporate CEO's remained the highest in the world by far. (Even when profits moderated, executive salaries kept going up. This received some notice in the media for a while.) The logic seemed inescapable -- getting rid of those high-paid U.S. workers was good for business. The new global economy served up workers willing to work for much less, and other countries were less troublesome about protecting the environment. A kind of frenzy swept through top managerial suites, rushing to strengthen the bottom line through downsizing.

Yet all the rhetoric about "doing more with less" has hidden some problems. Sennett (1998) notes an American Management Association study which found that repeated downsizings lowered profits and led to declining worker productivity. Worker morale likewise plummeted. During the rush to enhance the short term bottom line, Sennett notes, "Perfectly viable businesses are gutted or abandoned, capable employees are set adrift rather than rewarded, simply because the organization must prove to the market that it is capable of change" (p.51).

The rhetoric about becoming "lean and mean" is also misleading, according to economist David M. Gordon (1996). Gordon notes that U.S. corporations still have a much higher percentage of supervisors and managers than German or Japanese corporations, even after downsizing. Downsized managers have had a relatively easier time getting rehired than other workers. This "bureaucratic burden" is necessary, Gordon believes, because of the conflictual strategies U.S. corporations (and also Canadian and British corporations) take toward labor. With wages being depressed and job security nonexistent for many workers, there is little motivation for workers to perform, and therefore a huge supervisory force is required -- about 20 per cent of the work force. There must then be supervisors to watch over supervisors, and managers to watch over them, etc. This leads to much bad management, tension, and hostility. The result, Gordon says, is that U.S. corporations are "fat and mean."

Gordon has figures to show that productivity levels and profits are lower in "conflictual" style countries than in countries with a more cooperative management style, such as Germany, Japan, and the Scandinavian nations. I don't doubt that a cooperative style of management -- which offers job security and a voice in the company to the workers -- will give superior results in the long run. The loyalty of a work force does not directly appear on the balance sheet, so it has been given little weight in the Downsizing Decade. But there will be many prices paid in the future for ignoring the human loyalties of employees.

I noticed one unanticipated effect of downsizing in a recent article about telephone company U.S. West settling a strike quickly. It seems that U.S. West and other telcos have downsized so many workers that they cannot cover essential functions if the unions go out on strike. This means that the union has more power and the company must settle sooner. An analyst said the unions "have a tremendous amount of leverage because most of the telecom companies downsized in the mid-80s and early 90s" (Brooke, Sept. 1, 1998).

I expect further unpleasant surprises are in store for U.S. companies which have staked so much of their business on temporary, low-paid, and heavily supervised workers who have no reason to look out for the company's best interests.

The Nineties - the Downsizing Decade: People were downsized from their jobs; they downsized their expectations and hopes as well. There has been a persistent media campaign to inform Generation X'ers that they will have less income and fewer options than their parents, those lucky Boomers. I hope not too many of them downsize their hopes, because the potentials for having rewarding lives and careers still exist. It just may take some more searching to find them, through the chaotic debris left by a decade of too-hasty downsizing.

(*.) Raymond Gozzi, Jr., is Associate Professor in the Park School of Communications, Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY. His most recent book, The Power of Metaphor in the Age of Electronic Media, Hampton Press, 1999, contains articles from Dr. Gozzi's columns in ETC, as well as new chapters on metaphor, and is available from ISGS.

REFERENCES

I would like to thank James Curtis, formerly of the University of Missouri, for pointing out the David Kamp article to me.

Brooke, James. (Sept. 1, 1998). Strike Apparently Settled, Workers Return to U.S. West. The New York Times, A 20.

Gordon, David M. (1996). Fat and Mean. New York: Free Press.

Kamp, David. (Feb., 1999). The Tabloid Decade. Vanity Fair, p.64-75.

Schmid, Randolph. (June 24, 1999). Cell Phones Top '90s Stamps Voting. The Associated Press. Available at http://www.ap.org.

Sennett, Richard. (1998). The Corrosion of Character. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.

Uchitelle, Louis. (Aug. 20, 1998). Survey Finds Layoffs Slowed in Last 3 Years. The New York Times, D1.