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  • Crossing the Great Divide: Worker Risk, Uncertainty and Opportunity in the New Economy
  • Steven H. Lopez
Crossing the Great Divide: Worker Risk, Uncertainty and Opportunity in the New Economy. By Vicki Smith. ILR Press, 2001. Paper, $21.95.

The 1990s were an amalgam of seemingly contradictory trends. Unemployment was low, the economy grew steadily, and corporate profits were fat, yet employers downsized, outsourced, and reorganized themselves to a new brand of flexibility that means permanent employment insecurity for millions. Meanwhile, real wages declined or were stagnant (except for a brief moment in the late 1990s) for the bottom three-quarters of the work force. In place of the old bargain, which offered large numbers of American workers long-term employment stability and living wages in exchange for their commitment and loyalty to the firm, workers are now expected to assume greater risks and take more responsibility, often for less money and without long-term guarantees.

What is puzzling about all this, Vicki Smith notes in Crossing the Great Divide, is that workers more or less went along with it — even, at times, embracing change. Smith seeks to explain why through an examination of how four groups of workers — drawn from case studies of firms in three industries and a self-help group for unemployed professional workers — attempt to navigate the transition from the old era to the new.

At Reproco, workers earning $15,000 to $20,000 per year provide on-site mail-room and photocopying services to client firms — lawyers in a large Philadelphia law firm and engineers in a nuclear power plant. They flexibly coordinate and self-manage their work, resolving problems and dealing with "customers." Risk and uncertainty abound: they have little power vis-à-vis their clients, can be reassigned to another site at a moment's notice, enjoy few opportunities for advancement, and what little security they have is founded on the corporate strategy of the moment: outsourcing of core jobs from the firms they serve. Yet, Smith argues, [End Page 874] these jobs offer real opportunities. For workers with limited work experience and educational background, Reproco is better than the available alternatives and interactions with clients allow development of cultural capital in the form of self-confidence and communication skills.

WoodWorks has a log yard, a plywood factory, a stud mill, a saw mill, a finger-joint plant, and a planar all located at Madison, Montana. The company's new "participatory management" (PM) program was introduced to make these operations more competitive. Here the risks are structural: in a time of vanishing timber resources and corporate restructuring, these unionized workers' jobs are under threat. As a result, Smith finds many Woodworks employees willing to give the involvement program a chance, participating in problem-solving "task forces." Smith argues that despite coercive aspects, workers participate in the new arrangements not only because they hope to keep their jobs, but also because they welcome opportunities to use their brains as well as their bodies at work. Also, like Reproco workers, those at Woodworks benefit from opportunities to learn new competencies. (However, when Smith returns in 1999 she finds everything gone but the plywood factory, even though all but the log-yard workers actively participated in the PM program.)

Comptech, a major computer manufacturer in California, offers its permanent employees generous benefits and relative security, but also flexibly deploys large numbers of temps, paid slightly more than minimum wage. Smith finds Comptech temps, identifiable by their purple badges, working enthusiastically and collaboratively alongside permanent workers, hoping to use these positions as a springboard to permanent status. This carrot guarantees worker consent and self-discipline, even though only 10 to 15 percent of temp workers ever make it to permanent status. Still, Smith argues that most temps derive significant advantages, such as personal dignity, relatively pleasant working conditions, and status stemming from their association with the prestigious Comptech name.

Experience Unlimited (EU), a job club for unemployed professional workers in Sacramento, California, provides resources and training to facilitate job searching. Despite extensive efforts at "reinventing the self," however, very few members of EU actually land new permanent, professional positions. Smith reports that while these workers view the...

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