"White-Collar Sweatshop" by Jill Andresky Fraser

Bullying bosses, 24-hour on-call weeks, shrinking benefits -- and corporate workers never got their cut of the '90s boom.

By Suzy Hansen

March 1, 2001 | While most Americans would agree that white-collar workers put in more hours per week during the 1990s than ever before, chances are they think that those longer workdays and shorter weekends were the price to be paid for fatter paychecks. Newspaper and magazine stories about stock market whizzes and dot-com revolutionaries have rhapsodized about the juicy perks, big bonuses and take-home laptops corporations lavished on skilled workers in that decade of tight labor markets. Flush with stock options and courted by headhunters during one of the most prosperous decades of the century, these privileged workers, we were told by breathless lifestyle journalists, frequented fancy restaurants and purchased new cars and vacation homes.

Jill Andresky Fraser begs to differ, and she has the statistics to prove it. In her new book, "White-Collar Sweatshop," she argues that the much-hyped economic bounty of the '90s never made it into the wallets of most white-collar Americans. In the years between 1988 and 1998, Fraser writes, the middle 20 percent of American families saw only a $780 increase in annual income, while the richest 5 percent enjoyed a $50,760 surge. "White-Collar Sweatshop" is packed with such eye-opening facts. For example: White-collar males make on average only 6 cents more per hour than they did in 1973, when America was on the brink of the worst economic fallout since the Depression.

And if you think that all new college graduates reveled in $60,000 starting salaries, consider this: Between 1989 and 1997, entry-level wages for male college graduates actually declined by 6.5 percent. Women graduates watched their paychecks fall by 7.4 percent. Fraser cites two Labor Department economists who found that "unmarried men and women between the ages of 18 and 29 were significantly worse off economically during the 1990s than they had been in the 1970s or 1980s."

Fraser, a financial reporter, spent four years interviewing workers in their 20s, baby boomers and older employees from industries such as banking, publishing, technology and telecommunications. She also logged on to disgruntled-worker Web sites and visited chat rooms. "Above all, I have been interested in change," Fraser explains. What she found was that during the past decade of grandiose IPOs and fine young millionaires, life has gotten significantly worse for a whole lot of workers -- and not just economically. They're unhappier, too.

There's a numbing similarity to most of the individual stories Fraser relates -- tales of stress-related illnesses, 24-hour on-call weeks, shrinking pension plans, Big Brother-style e-mail monitoring, a temporary workforce completely bereft of benefits and upward mobility, and bullying workplace atmospheres, not to mention smaller paychecks and harrowing staff purges. Surveying the carnage, Fraser detects a recent transformation in corporate America "equivalent to an industrial revolution for white-collar workers who, by necessity, have learned to adjust."

(It's important to note that Fraser mostly writes about America's larger corporations, not dot-coms. She saves that revolution for later, using it to demonstrate how traditional white-collar Americans preferred to risk everything at a dot-com rather than deal with the drudgery and injustice of their jobs in more traditional industries.)

"White-Collar Sweatshop" boasts more than just numbers; Fraser names names and details hair-raising policies at well-known corporations in vibrant detail. Certain employee-unfriendly companies and hard-as-nails CEOs keep popping up throughout the book, such as Andrew Grove of Intel, Sandy Weill of Citigroup and Louis Gerstner of IBM.

Grove, author of the appropriately titled "Only the Paranoid Survive" (a sort of corporate Bible for aspiring egomaniacs), once slammed "a stave of wood the size of a baseball bat" on a conference table to rebuke an employee who arrived late for a meeting. At Intel, Grove initiated a creepy "rankings and ratings" system designed to measure the productivity of each employee against his or her co-workers. One weary staffer, tired of looking over his shoulder, complained that "it got so bad you were afraid to help other people."

Next page: CEOs' salaries jumped 490 percent while workers got e-mail-free weekends