My recent posts on the battle over the union wrangling about “lifetime jobs” at The Boston Globe (see “The Value of a Lifetime Job: Would You Believe It’s $33,000” and, earlier, “Does Anyone Really Think They Have a ‘Job for Life’?”) were based around what I consider to be a pretty obvious premise—that the concept of a “lifetime job” is completely unsustainable in our 2009 economy, and it is reckless to put a lifetime job guarantee ahead of the survival of the business and jobs for everyone else.
That’s why this story in The New York Times this week about lifetime job guarantees in Japan resonated with me. According to statistics released Wednesday, May 20, the Japanese economy in the first quarter suffered its worst contraction since 1955, declining 15.2 percent on an annualized basis. But a far smaller portion of workers have lost their jobs in Japan than in either the U.S. or the European Union (Japan’s unemployment rate in April was 4.8 percent, compared with 8.9 percent in the U.S. and Europe).
And here’s the kicker, according to the Times: “Analysts say this is because lifetime employment is alive and well in Japan, with the state playing a big role in keeping it so.”
The story goes on to point out that “Japan’s obsession with keeping workers employed—even those who are not needed—comes at a cost. Companies slash wages, which reduces consumer spending. Businesses become more reluctant to take on new recruits, shutting young people out of the labor force. And productivity plummets, hurting Japan’s competitiveness in an increasingly aggressive international market.”
A lifetime job was a reasonable notion in my grandfather’s time, but it is completely out of whack in a 21st century economy. It’s a holdover from a long-ago time and about as functional in today’s world as a buggy whip. No wonder Japan’s economy hasn’t been able to ever really recover, and shame on the Boston Newspaper Guild for having the chutzpah to even make this a part of labor negotiations.
As I’ve said before, don’t get me wrong: I love the concept of a “job for life,” but I put that in the same category as buying a ticket in hopes of winning the lottery. It’s a wonderful fantasy, but totally removed from the reality of day-to-day life. If you want proof of that, just take a good hard look at Japan.
Now we know what the value of those “lifetime” jobs are that they’re squabbling about over at The Boston Globe. Would you believe that it only comes down to a “lump-sum payment of $33,000 plus severance?”
Earlier this week, I questioned the relevance of “lifetime” jobs given the vagaries of the 2009 economy, especially the notion that the Newspaper Guild would actually be foolish enough to put lifetime job guarantees for 170 people ahead of the survival of the business and jobs for everyone else in The Boston Globe’s workforce. The Globe’s parent, The New York Times Co., has threatened to close the newspaper down unless it gets some $20 million in savings from its unions to help cut into the $85 million the Globe is projected to lose this year.
Well, the negotiations have continued, and according to The Wall Street Journal, the latest “proposal under consideration by The Boston Globe’s largest union includes a pay cut of 8.4 percent and the elimination of lifetime job guarantees held by 190 members in exchange for a $33,000 payment plus severance for each of those guaranteed employees who gets laid off, according to two people briefed on the terms.”
There are some other wrinkles in the contract negotiations, such as expanding the workweek to 40 hours from 37.5 hours (another oldie-but-goodie union benefit that should have died long ago), but I’m scratching my head over the negotiated payout to waive the lifetime job guarantee.
I agree with what former newspaper editor and Reflections of a Newsosaur blogger Alan Mutter said about this—that “the idea of lifetime jobs seems hopelessly quaint in this era of Darwinian globalization, continuous technological disruption and profound economic uncertainty.” Anyone who thinks that any job is guaranteed to them for life regardless of whatever else may be going on around them is living in a fantasy world, in my view.
Having said that, the actions of the Boston Newspaper Guild here seem totally preposterous. Why would they sell out “lifetime” job guarantees for a measly $33,000 per person? Isn’t that a terribly piddling amount to get per person to give up a “lifetime” job?
“The key sticking point in [the Globe] negotiations has been the existence of lifetime job guarantees held by 190 members hired before 1992,” according to the Journal.
“According to the proposal, the company after Jan. 10, 2010, can lay off any of those employees in exchange for the lump-sum payment of $33,000 plus severance,” the Journal reports.
No one close to the negotiations in labor or management is talking about this, of course, and I’m sure when they finally do, there will be some standard BS from the union about how this $33,000 payout is really a good thing and the very best they could do for the workers in this circumstance, blah, blah, blah.
Still, I can’t help thinking—only $33,000? A lifetime job guarantee is only worth $33,000? And this is what the union took the newspaper to the brink of a shutdown for? This is the best they could do for their members?
Everyone has their price, and some come more cheaply than others. Judas sold out Jesus for 40 pieces of silver; the Boston Newspaper Guild did it for $33,000 per head.
Whenever the union gets around to putting the PR spin on this sellout, I hope they’ll spare the platitudes and simply admit the obvious—that lifetime job guarantees are a joke and the $33,000 payout simply reflects the notion that despite all the union rhetoric, it’s a worthless and unsustainable concept for working people in the 21st century.
Here’s one of those word-association questions: What do you immediately think of when you hear the term “job for life?”
If you’re like me, your mind probably jumps to this: the pope; the queen of England; Supreme Court justices; Hugo Chavez and Robert Mugabe; dictators in Asia and Africa; and tenured schoolteachers. I don’t know anyone who equates the notion of a lifetime job with journalists or newspaper professionals, but that quaint concept is at the heart of the ongoing struggle for the survival of The Boston Globe, New England’s leading newspaper.
“The Boston Globe dodged a corporate bullet [this week] as the New York Times Co. … backed off a threat to notify federal authorities that it plans to close the paper within 60 days,” according to Howard Kurtz writing in The Washington Post. The Globe managed to avoid a shutdown notice because the Times Co. reached an agreement with six of the Globe’s seven unions, including the Teamsters, over its demands for $20 million in concessions, “but not with the Boston Newspaper Guild, which has accused Times executives of ‘bullying’ tactics.”
So what’s the hang-up with the last union, you might ask? According to the Post story, “The sticking point remains lifetime job guarantees for 170 of the guild’s 660 journalists, advertising and business office employees, previously negotiated in return for other concessions.”
The fact that yet another newspaper is on the brink of closing down isn’t a shock, of course, given all that’s happening in the newspaper business all over America. The surprise here, at least to me, is that anyone would actually think that the concept of a “lifetime job” is sustainable in our 2009 economy, and, that a union like the Newspaper Guild would be foolish enough to put a lifetime job guarantee for 170 ahead of the survival of the business and jobs for everyone else in The Boston Globe’s workforce.
The notion of a lifetime job, he adds, “was born of arrogance on the part of [newspaper] publishers who thought their market supremacy would endure forever, and arrogance on the part of unions who once wielded sufficient power to intimidate management into agreeing to this perfectly preposterous proposition. Apart from federal judges and tinhorn dictators, no one has the luxury of a job for life. And no one should.”
Don’t get me wrong; I love the concept of a “job for life,” but I put that in the same category as buying a ticket in hopes of winning the lottery. It’s a wonderful fantasy, but totally removed from the reality of day-to-day life. And, a lifetime job is an “unsustainable” business proposition, notes media critic Dan Kennedy, especially “at a time when the newspaper business is getting much, much smaller.”
My grandfather used to tout the concept of lifetime jobs, and I heard it when he retired from his position as a printer for the New York Daily News back in the late 1960s. As much as I loved him, I questioned it as a kid then the same way I question it now as an adult so many years later.
The notion of a “lifetime” job wasn’t sustainable in my grandfather’s day, and it isn’t sustainable now some 40 years later. It’s a relic of a time long past, and proof once more that organized labor too often is completely out of touch, and they would rather argue over out-of-date concepts than focus on the difficult economic realities of the 2009 workplace.
Every so often, a story comes along that captures both the tenor and tone of the times as well as the speculative fears and concerns that people have for the future. It’s a story that cuts both ways, so to speak, and is truly a “sign of the times.”
Here’s the hook to the story: “National numbers are not yet in, but regional Girl Scout councils nationwide are seeing the impact of the down economy, as well as bad winter weather, in declines as large as 19 percent in pre-order sales, which took place January through early February.”
Yes, the economy is down and that is clearly a factor, but here are two bigger reasons that the USA Today story completely misses:
With pre-order sales (mostly door-to-door and in the workplace) making up around 70 percent of cookie sales, according to the Girl Scouts, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that a lot fewer people in the workplace due to job cuts means a lot fewer people to buy and sell Girl Scout cookies. Yes, the overall economy has certainly reduced how many boxes of Thin Mints or Tagalongs people buy, but the big reduction in workers since the recession kicked into gear is a much bigger factor. After all, how many Girl Scout cookie order forms did you see this year compared with past seasons?
And, I believe that the issue of the Employee Free Choice Act has helped to clamp down on all workplace solicitations for Girl Scout cookies or anything else. Ohio attorney Eric Johnson wrote a Workforce.com article on this very topic recently, and he hit the issue square on the head when he discussed the need for HR pros to update their employee handbooks to deal with this matter:
“Employers often permit charitable solicitations (United Way, Girl Scout cookies, etc.) in the workplace,” he said. “While serving a good purpose, permitting that to occur can subsequently preclude the employer from prohibiting union solicitation or materials in the workplace. Given the looming presence of the proposed Employee Free Choice Act and renewed union organizing momentum, the employer must revisit the phrasing of this policy.”
In my mind, simply blaming a drop-off in Girl Scout cookie sales on the terrible economy is a cheap and easy way out. There’s a lot more to it than that, and like most things occurring in our current workplace, there’s no one single factor to pin it on.
The drop in Girl Scout cookie sales is one of those lagging economic indicators you sometimes hear about. Yes, it’s a sign of the times, but it reflects what has already happened, not where we might be going. And, it tells me that we probably have a whole lot more to go through before our workplaces get back to anything that passes for normal.
I get a lot of questions here at the Business of Management, and many of them have broad appeal to managers at just about every level. So, I’ve started a new Business of Management blog feature: Hey Management Guy! If you have a question about a workforce management practice (stupid or otherwise), just post it at the bottom of this blog item or e-mail it here to me at jhollon@workforce.com. I’ll pick out the best queries and answer them here each month.
Hey Management Guy! My company has a problem with employees who don’t know how to keep their mouths shut. Management is constantly hearing about internal information that has been passed along to competitors, vendors and, worst of all, the media. How can we get workers to understand that what happens inside should stay inside?
—Cathy from Cupertino, California
Cathy:
This is a new question about a very old problem that just about every organization struggles with. In fact, The Management Guy remembers working at a newspaper where the bald baboon of an editor was driven absolutely bonkers by internal information getting leaked to the competition. So he sent a nasty and threatening memo to the staff warning of dire consequences for anyone caught doing so. Of course, his nasty memo got faxed to the competition no more than 10 minutes after he sent it out—from the fax machine right outside his office, no less.
This illustrates a critical point: For better or worse, workers respond to the tone set by the managers above them. No organization likes internal information getting leaked, but if you want it to stop, you need the top managers to treat everyone like adults and give them a business case for why they need to stop.
In fact, there is another Cupertino company that is struggling with this very problem: Yahoo. New CEO Carol Bartz recently sent out a memo venting about a lot of things, but specifically griping about someone “forwarding her first company-wide email to some blogs,” according to The Wall Street Journal. She wrote that the person who did that should step forward and resign, but failing that, “maybe we should have a weekly bounty on such people. I will throw in the first thousand dollars.”
I know Carol Bartz has a lot to deal with at Yahoo given the mess she was left by founder Jerry Yang (a people-challenged executive if there ever was one), but putting a bounty on the heads of workers who leak internal information is really old school and reminiscent of Nixon’s attempt to plug leaks in the White House by forming the “plumbers” unit. We all know how well that turned out.
I’d advise your executives—and other execs, like Carol Bartz—to resist the urge to punish or offer a bounty on the heads of blabbermouths. Instead, spend a little time educating the workforce on the dangers of leaking internal business information. Talk to them about company secrets and why they need to remain secret. And most of all, ask for their help in knowing the information boundaries. I guarantee that if you do this instead of playing “Wanted: Dead or Alive,” you’ll have a lot fewer leaks and a lot more employees willing to help you make it happen.
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