One loyal employee discovers that corporate values have changed
So why did Wall Street take a dive when the government announced the biggest increase in jobs for more than a decade?' Marcia asked.
On my way home from a vacation in the Caribbean, I'd planned to spend my time at Miami airport reading the novel I'd picked up at the bookstore. In fact, I'd lowered my standards and bought a paperback with gold writing on the cover - something that anyone with any pretensions to intelligence should never do, even if it is written by a lawyer. Then, in the airline lounge, I met Marcia.
So I trotted out the stuff about inflation fears creeping into the system and higher interest rates making bond yields unattractive and leading to overall nervousness. She seemed unconvinced.
'Surely getting people back to work must be a good thing,' she said. I found it hard to contest the point.
Marcia knew about work. She worked hard and rarely took a vacation. So she couldn't have been visiting the sunshine state for fun. It was not in her character and nor was she dressed for it. There were two types of people in the lounge: business travellers in formal clothes, earnestly making notes; and vacationers dressed casually, all apparently engrossed in John Grisham's latest chronicle.
Marcia also knew all about work from a professional perspective. When I first met her, she was a secretary in the personnel department of a large corporation which was the main employer in the mid-western city where she lived. Through a combination of determination and 'inter-personal skills' she had worked her way up to a management position.
She had loved her job and it had showed. She was warm and sympathetic and put her heart and soul into helping people solve their personal problems, plan their careers and develop their skills. She firmly believed that a caring employer developed the loyalty among its workforce which was essential if the business was to prosper.
Her own loyalty had taken a knock some time in the 1980s when the department had been renamed human resources. She had found it hard to adapt to a new culture which seemed to regard employees only as an input to the wealth creation process. But she had hung in there - partly because she believed her values were still important and partly because she needed the money. She was a single parent with a mortgage to pay and two kids to feed.
Then, last year, she and hundreds of her co-workers had been sacked. Of course, it wasn't called that - the word was downsizing or restructuring or some other such euphemism. But however it was described, the impact was the same. She was devastated. But the company's share price had gone up and the CEO's earnings were given a huge boost - though not enough to make the feature in Time magazine which correlated the remuneration of top management with the number of people they fired.
After getting over the shock of finding herself unemployed, she had sat down, analysed her skills and worked out how she could pay the bills. So she had set herself up as an 'outplacement' counsellor - helping others to cope with similar trauma.
It turned out that she had been in Miami to attend a seminar on Patterns of Employment in the New Millennium. It wasn't that she needed to be told about the brave new world of temporary and part-time contracts, self employment and job insecurity. She was already there. But it was a chance to hand out business cards and tout for work - a new skill she had been forced to develop quickly.
'So how's it all going?' I asked. 'Well, it's pretty unnerving,' she replied. 'But what isn't these days? I mean I sit down regularly and do my cashflow forecasts and, if I can see my way ahead for the next few months, I feel things are all right. But I guess that, even if you've got a full- time job you can't see that far ahead these days, can you?'
But the lack of a regular salary check was having it's effect. She had put off replacing the car and having the house fixed up - both of which needed doing badly. She couldn't help wondering what the impact of her - and all those like her - postponing spending was having on the economy. And she wanted to know why the financial community was so convinced that corporate lay-offs were such a good thing.
Before I could come up with an even remotely plausible response, Marcia looked at her watch and announced that it was time for her flight. We kissed goodbye and I wished her luck as she scuttled off towards the gate.
I sat down, picked up my book and immersed myself in the tale of a young Memphis lawyer who was going to win his case against the forces of evil. I needed to be back in a world where the good guy won.