“It’s not as easy as it was,” White says.
White’s evolution from employee to contractor
is emblematic of a trend in the American
workplace a full decade after the recession
ended: The economy keeps growing.
Unemployment is at a half-century low. Yet
many people feel their jobs have been devalued
by employers that increasingly assign a higher
priority to shareholders and customers.
Economic research, government data and
interviews with workers sketch a picture of
lagging wages, eroding benefits and demands
for employees to do more without more pay.
The loyalty and security that many say they once
felt from their employers have diminished, and
with it some measure of their satisfaction.
Experts point to a sea change in the American
job experience that began decades ago but has
grown more visible across a wider spectrum of
jobs. They see a confluence of forces squeezing
workers — from globalization and workplace
automation to a decline of labor unions, fiercer
price competition and a growing use of outside
firms and contractors.
At the same time, the gulf between CEO pay and
median worker pay has widened. Publicly traded
companies are increasingly plowing cash into
stock buybacks and shareholder dividends.
“We’ve made decisions and baked into the
structure this extreme inequality at this point,”
said Barbara Dyer of the Good Companies,
Good Jobs Initiative at MIT’s Sloan School
of Management, a project to improve
management practices. “It’s a function of a lot
of choices that we may not have even been
conscious of.”
A collaborative analysis of the 2018 General
Social Survey by The AP-NORC Center and
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