A sidelight on hard times not often mentioned is the situation of those still at work.
Of course, they (we) are thankful to have jobs at all. But rather than a nation divided between the anxious, broke unemployed (or underemployed) and the comfortable, successful employed, the dichotomy for years—even more so now—has been between the unemployed and the overworked, the latter including people in some high-level, privileged (in terms of tools and perks) positions.
It's worth taking a look at a book published all the way back in 2001. Wall Street was bullish then, but there were signs of trouble to come in what people were telling Jill Andresky Fraser, author of White-Collar Sweatshop. After four years of interviews with white-collar workers, Fraser wrote, "Overwork is epidemic… not because of career advances but because of a corporate environment that has depended upon squeezing… more and more work out of fewer people with fewer resources [less money, smaller staffs]." Many jobs, she adds, "carry with them diminishing financial rewards… raises that fail to keep up with growing workloads and inflation, or eroding health care benefits, or shrinking pensions…"
Love your Blackberry—or not? "The overwork, stress, and insecurity of today's workplaces," Fraser wrote, "has been exacerbated, not relieved, by the proliferation of high-tech equipment—laptop computers, cell phones, electronic desk calendars, beepers, portable fax machines, Palm Pilots, and more—that help people try to keep up with growing workloads while also making it impossible for them to fully escape their jobs and relax."
That "culture of overwork, extreme stress and underreward" was creating problems for business itself, Fraser noted, notably the problems of "talent flight and declining investment." In the end, she wrote in a statement that now seems prophetic, these practices "came to support an outside view, often quite accurate, of the large-corporate world as either out of control or out of ideas."
