Book Review of Disposable American - by Louis Uchitelle

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The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences
by Louis Uchitelle
Vintage, 287 pp., $14.95 (paper)

Through the story of the three Stanley CEOs, Uchitelle traces a mental journey taken by a great many top managers over the past few decades in managing US companies.


The new mindset of US managers was well described by Uchitelle in his brief account of an interview with Trani (one of the characters in the story) in November 2004 (just a few days before he, too, retired, with an $8 million bonus and a $1.3 million-a-year pension). "Layoffs and plant closings," Trani says, "are not such a rare event anymore that one generally makes a big deal out of them." Scarcely mentioning the laid-off workers, he acknowledges no hesitation, no regret—in fact, no alternatives. The story, as he tells it, comes down to the difference between successful leaders, who "look at reality as it exists," and unsuccessful ones, who make the mistake of "hoping for it to change."


Jack Welch had pushed more than a hundred thousand workers off the GE payroll. Welch's combative style has gone out of fashion lately; in fact, Uchitelle had something to do with that. A longtime reporter for The New York Times, he was largely responsible for "The Downsizing of America," an attention-getting series of Times articles on the mass layoffs of the early and mid-1990s. Those articles helped inspire a backlash.

Uchitelle's Layoffs, reminds us, that layoffs were a hot issue in the 1992 presidential campaign. Bill Clinton came down hard on companies that closed factories where Americans made "a decent standard of living" while opening "sweatshops to pay starvation wages in another country. Candidate Clinton wanted corporations to spend at least 1.5 percent of their earnings on "continued education and training." (Companies that made such a commitment were less likely to let employees go, research showed.)

But once he became President Clinton — and as the budget deficit moved to the center of his thinking — gave a new name and spin to "continued education and training." Now the Clintonites began to speak of "lifetime learning," which was more exhortation than policy and directed mainly at employees, not employers. Americans who had lost their jobs or who sensed their skills becoming outmoded were told that they could take charge of their careers, go back to school, and emerge retooled and "reempowered."

The interesting thing in this book is that one of the CEOs included in the plot is an industrial engineer.