I am, I believe, the only American who has actually read through all seven of the articles in the New York Times multi-author series on “downsizing” published in March — and I only did it because I got paid to do so by Forbes MediaCritic. Now Times Books has brought the series out as a 356- page paperback. The publication is an unfortunate bit of timing, considering the April 23 study issued by the Labor Department and the Council of Economic Advisers. The study reveals a key problem with the series — namely, that the phenomenon it purports to describe doesn’t exist. Private sector payrolls grew 8.7 percent between January 1993 and March 1996 (faster employment growth than in any other G-7 country).
Actually, the series itself gives the lie to its own central theory. Even though, according to the Times, “there has been a net increase of 27 million jobs in America since 1979, enough to easily absorb all the laid-off workers plus the new people beginning careers, and the national unemployment rate is low,” we’re still living through “the most acute job insecurity since the Depression. And this in turn has produced an unrelenting angst that is shattering people’s notions of work and self and the very promise of tomorrow. “
That angst seems particularly acute among the multimillionaires the Times interviewed — and it’s about time the paper showed some sensitivity to the needs of the multimillionaire community. Take this harrowing story of how the other halflives:
Robert Miller is yielding only reluctantly to the likelihood that, at 52, he will never again command his past income. He continues to live with his wife and two children in a $ 700,000, six-bedroom home in a rarified [sic] gated community on Sawgrass Island in Ponte Vedra. . . . Only recently have the Millers even contemplated moving. They have their eye on another gated community, where they might scale back to four bedrooms.
Tragedy? You bet, and Miller is not alone. When Pulitzer prize-winner Rick Bragg interviews a downsized corporate executive, he shows what it really feels like to be down to your last quarter of a million dollars:
Behind the front, there have been difficult choices. . . . Mr. Sharlow got a year’s severance pay when he was laid off, so only in the last two years has he had to peel from their original savings of about $ 300,000. The withdrawals, countered by profits on his investments, have left him with about $ 250,000. . . . The bulk of their nest egg is in a 401(k), an ever-changing mix of mutual funds, stocks and bonds. He juggles them now and then, trying to squeeze out every penny.
But mere numbers cannot convey the assaults on their dignity that Mr. Sharlow and his wife have to face: “Now the two ride to work together some days,” Bragg tells us. “The transmission in the Mercedes slips so badly that sometimes he has to beg it to roll.”
Those who think that two incomes will protect them from the horrors of downsizing should think again:
Karen Myers is 40 years old, a lawyer and the mother of three. Her husband, Robert, is a pediatrician. . . . They live in a new neighborhood of custom-built homes in Centerville . . . “Many of these kids I see are on their fifth or sixth move because the company keeps saying, “We’re not making enough money; we need to downsize more,” she said recently . . . Mrs. Myers was talking over coffee and muffins with her neighbor, Mary Ellen Knecht. Mrs. Knecht and her husband, Mark, who quite his job at GIS last fall for more satisfying and lucrative work, have four children.
“We are the new homeless” said Mrs. Knecht.
If so, that’s one hell of a homeless shelter Mrs. Knecht is living in there.
Then there are “the new nomad dads,” those left to wander the country in their private jets:
Monday moringins, Cinda Woodward rises early, very early, so she can send her husband, Jeff, off at five-thirty on the first leg of his weekly commute — the ninety-minute drive to the Cincinnati airport. By noon, he arrives in Gainesville, Florida, where he goes to work as the chief financial officer for Gold Standard Multimedia, an electronic health- care publishing company. . . . Mr. Woodward — who left his Dayton job at Mead Data Central in May of 1995 after it was acquired by Reed Elsevier PLC, a Dutch-British conglomerate — is one of the new nomad dads . . .
I’d rather be the one to be the nomad than drag the whole family around the country,” Mr. Woodward said, adding that, at 48 he considers himself fortunate to have the education and the financial flexibility to adapt to the new world. (That financial flexibility made the mechanics of adaptation a good bit easier in the spring, when he began flying his own plane to Gainesville.)
The trauma does no end there. Consider the experience of the undownsized: ” Those who have not lost their jobs and their identities, and do not expect to, are also being traumatized. The witnesses, the people who stay employed but sit next to empty desks and wilting ferns, are grappling with the guilt that psychologists label survivor’s syndrome.”
If comparing not being fired from a high-paying job to surviving Auschwitz doesn’t get you, how about the agony the journalists who wrote this misbegotten thing had to go through? A special appendix tells us of their trials. Rick Bragg says, “I have a high threshold for tears. But I saw Mr. Muse and Mr. Sharlow cry in anger and shame and at their own futility, and while some readers blasted the once-so-prosperous Mr. Sharlow for lamenting his new, downsized existence, or scorned Mr. Muse because he wanted to hold on to a shifting way of life, I could not turn away from them once I had come to know them.
“My job was to crawl as deep inside their lives as I could.”
Mine, too. I think I’ll start by crawling inside Robert Miller’s $700,000 house.
