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Re-valu-ing
the Family, Part Thirteen: Culprits' and Their Characteristics—What
They Do for and to Families
by
Richard and Linda Eyre
(www.valuesparenting.com)
There
is nothing families need more than employment and income. Yet, ironically,
more and more of the institutions that provide these things, in their
own efforts of self-preservation and growth, have become a destructive
force operating against the best interests of families.
In this week's
installment we will look at the first three types of larger institutions
(see last week's article for the full list of ten) that put families
in peril . . . work and professional institutions, financial institutions,
and merchandising institutions.
1. Work/Professional
Institutions
There is nothing
families need more than employment and income. Yet, ironically,
more and more of the institutions that provide these things, in
their own efforts of self-preservation and growth, have become a
destructive force operating against the best interests of families.
Today, employers
are more than a source of income and support. They are sources of
identity and of image, and they exert more and more control over
where people live and how people live.
C. S. Lewis
said, "The home is the ultimate career. All other careers exist
for one purpose and that is to support the ultimate career." Today,
it seems the opposite is often the case. The family seems to be
there to support the career, or at least to play second fiddle to
it. If the employment institution wants to transfer us to another
location, we go, without very much serious thought about what the
move will do to our family. If a promotion is available, we take
it, without much consideration of how the new responsibility or
new hours will affect family. When we meet or are introduced to
new people, they're more likely to ask us "what we do" than about
our families. We've become a society that lives to work rather than
working to live.
Also, in their
obsession for self-preservation and profit, the work institutions
of today are into downsizing, cutbacks, force reductions and compensation
restructuring which have everything to do with the bottom line but
nothing to do with responsibility to the families of employees.
Second incomes and longer hours become "necessities" to families
who are trying to live the American dream created by merchandising
and financial institutions (which we'll get to next). The whirl
of money and things and position and status and appearance and promotion
and all the rest of it is what we read about, think about, talk
about, and worry about, and in the process, the big institutions
win and the little institution -- the family -- loses.
Let's be specific
about how this happens: Private sector business, particularly large
corporate structures, employ most parents and supply families with
all essential goods and services. Yet in supreme irony, corporate
America is ravaging families in all sorts of unprecedented ways.
The damage is being done on four primary fronts:
a. Wages,
in real terms, are declining for blue collar and non-management
workers.
b. Insecurity
is at an all-time high. Downsizing and layoffs loom as a constant
threat.
c. Work days
and work weeks are getting longer.
d. Corporations
are not doing nearly enough to assist and accommodate parents
and to address work/life issues.
The growing
chasm between the ever-increasing wealth and prosperity of U. S.
corporate management (particularly top management) and the common
employees and workers in those same corporations is shocking . .
. and truly dangerous. The top executive in a typical mid- to large-size
U. S. corporation makes more than one hundred times as much as the
lowest paid full-time worker in that same company. Top executives'
pay goes up dramatically even as companies downsize. Examples abound:
Levi Strauss & Company paid its president $125 million in 1996
and then announced plans in 1997 to lay off one-third of its U.
S. work force. (1) Michael Eisner, the Disney CEO was paid $204
million in 1996, a year when the median wage was $33,500.00 -- meaning
a regular person would have to work 6,182 years to earn what Eisner
earned in one year. (2) At IBM in 1995, right after 60,000 workers
were fired, the company gave $5.8 million bonuses to its top five
executives. The IBM chairman received a $2.6 million bonus on top
of his normal compensation of $12.4 million, yet that same year
his secretaries were told to expect salary cuts of 36 percent. (3)
Real wages,
adjusted for inflation, for production and non-supervisory workers
(80 percent of all workers and the vast majority of parents) declined
10 percent between the mid-70s and the mid-90s.(4) The median worker's
salary (the middle of the middle class) fell 5 percent between 1989
and 1997.(5) That trend, and the constant increases in pay and perks
to top management, continues as we start a new millennium. Never
before in American history have the majority of American workers
suffered real wage reductions while the per capita gross domestic
product was advancing.(6). By contrast, in the thirty years between
the mid-40s and mid-70s, every sector of society, rich, middle class,
and poor experienced at least a doubling of real income, and the
bottom fifth advanced faster than the top fifth.
With all the
talk we hear about a kinder corporate America offering flexible
work schedules and other stress-busting programs, most companies
still go by the old rules. USA Today,(7) in 1999
said, "Mounting evidence shows companies are not adopting changes
widely toted as key to helping workers balancing work and family.
Family friendly programs such as job-sharing, shorter work weeks,
elder care help, and on-site child care are hardly the rage." And
a survey of corporation human resource officials shows that 64 percent
think their companies don't make a real effort to inform employees
of the family friendly programs that are available in their
companies.
Managers' minds
are on profit margins, competitive edge, mergers and acquisitions,
and the bottom line, not on the human, personal, and family
needs of their employees.
With the ever-present
culture of downsizing and layoffs, employees are understandably
hesitant to ask either for better wages or for more family-friendly
benefits. In the mid-90s, a nationwide poll indicated that forty
percent of American workers worried that they might be fully or
partially laid off or have their wages reduced. During the two previous
years, the granter(?) of the polls respondents actually had
either been laid off, reduced, or taken a pay cut.(p.69) There were
over 600,000 announced firings in 1995 (a year of economic recovery
and progress) involving some of America's most prestigious corporations.
(AT&T fired 40,000 people that year, GM 75,000, IBM 60,000,
Sears Roebuck 50,000. (8)
A significant
minority of downsized workers fail to find new jobs, and many of
those who do end up with a lower-paying job. In fact, a labor department
study showed that only 71 percent of downsized workers find another
job within two years and less than half of those find a job that
pays as well as the one they lost.(9)
Even as American
workers get lower wages and job security, they are working longer
hours. The number of adult Americans who hold two or more jobs went
up 64.6 percent between the early '50s and the late '90s.(10) Compared
with twenty years ago, the average American is now on the job an
additional 163 hours a year -- essentially working a full month
longer!(11) Imagine the family devastation that results from this
extra work time -- in a society where both parents usually work.
As in so many things, the children are the real losers!
In the previous
century the societal goal seemed to be the shortening and limiting
of the work week. Unions played a huge role on this goal and on
the goal of more just wages. Today most unions are all but emasculated.
By the '90s there were more than 1,500 corporation consultants earning
500 million per year, helping corporations bust unions -- advertising
their services with words like "we will show you how to screw your
employees . . . how to keep them smiling on low pay, how to maneuver
them into low-paying jobs they are afraid to walk away from."
These troublesome
trends in wages, job security, hours and other work/life issues
are evident throughout the private sector. And within several sub-categories
of business -- particularly the financial, merchandising, media,
and information institutions -- additional factors are at work which
undermine and threaten families.
2. Financial
Institutions
Ever since
there has been money, there have been bankers or their equivalent
-- people who borrow and lend money. But it is only recently that
financial institutions have become so huge and so influential that
they exert major control over many aspects of our personal and our
societal lives. They have, in essence, created a credit society
and a debt culture in which families spend before they earn and
in which we are oriented to instant gratification at almost every
level.
Credit
cards, pre-approved, arrive in the mail -- even to college freshmen
and eighteen-year-olds who have no clue how to use credit.
We heard first-hand when our oldest daughter left for
her freshman year at Wellesley College in Boston, actually asked
me for advice! One of the things I sent with her was a
good pair of scissors and an admonition to cut in half every credit
card she received in the mail. She told me later that she had used
those scissors more than a dozen times. Her roommate, I found out
later, had never borrowed the scissors and presented her parents
with a $5,000.00 bill when she went home for Christmas.
People buy
everything from cars to Christmas presents based on the amount of
the monthly payment rather than on the total price. Often they do
not even know the full ticket cost, let alone the total amount they
will ultimately pay including interest.
Parents, in
an effort to "keep up with the Joneses" and to give their children
all they need become debt ridden and, in the process, teach dangerous
financial principles to their kids even as they spend less and less
time with their families as they work longer and longer hours to
pay their bills.
It has been
observed that you can tell a lot about a society by which of its
sectors is building the biggest or most magnificent edifices. For
centuries, churches and cathedrals and synagogues and temples were
the most impressive structures. Then there was a span of years when
government buildings seemed to be the biggest and most opulent.
Then the skyscrapers, plants, and corporate headquarters of major
industrial corporations. Today, many would argue that the most opulent
and pretentious new buildings are banks and other financial institutions.
The competition between them and their push for growth and stockholder
profit has been their incentive to create a debt and credit mentality
that is hugely destructive to families.
3. Merchandising
Institutions
Of course there
have always been salesmen. And the very essence of commerce and
economy at any level is the promotion and marketing of goods and
services. And certainly a desire for things -- a materialism in
some form or other -- has existed since the beginning of time.
But again,
what has changed everything is the emergence of huge and influential
marketing and advertising institutions whose single goal or reason
for existence is to sell more product -- without regard to the true
needs or buying capacities of the consumer.
A close
friend of ours, chairman of a worldwide ad agency, is uncommonly
objective and frank about his profession. "The basic goal of advertising,"
he says, "is to make people think they need what they really only
want." Think about the implications of that. Hundreds of advertising
impressions (from billboards to radio and TV spots) come at us every
day, each carefully designed to make us dissatisfied with what we
have, how we look, where we are, what we do, how we live.
Because of
the messages of advertising, people tend to measure themselves (and
others) more by what they have than by what they are. Appearances
supersede substance. Things become more important than people. Acquisition
and achievements are given more time and more effort than relationships
and family.
Occasionally
an ad plays on warm family images, but most often glitz, social
status, materialism and "freedom" from burden or obligation is the
portrayal ideal. Our own work-a-day family responsibilities look
boring and mundane next to advertising images.
So parents
and families take a double hit: 1. They are prompted to be dissatisfied
with simple, family-oriented lifestyles. 2. They are enticed to
spend more on things that compete with family needs.
And it's not
just advertising. The huge American merchandising machine includes
everything from infomercials, home shopping channels, and on-line
purchasing to wholesale clubs, rebates, and high-powered retail
promotions. On the one hand, all of these service our consumer needs
and can make life more convenient; but on the other hand, they fill
our lives with complexity, with unmet "needs," and with debt --
robbing us of family time and family awareness and priority in the
process.
In marketing
parliance, there is a distinction made between "demand pull" and
"product push." Sometimes a real need or demand "pulls" or creates
a product and a distribution system. Other times a product "pushes"
or creates its own interest and market. Before the twentieth century,
most of our economy operated primarily by demand pull. But with
the emergence of today's huge merchandising/advertising institutions
there is a massive shift to product push -- and the "products" range
from unlimited things to styles to programming
to attitudes. And very few of them enhance the family --
in fact, most compete with and deprioritize family and neighborhood
relationships.
Merchandising
institutions, from agencies to the marketing arms of retail and
industrial giants, measure themselves on how much product they can
sell and how much money they can extract from people -- from families.
And it's not just money they extract, it's time, and attention,
and priorities, much of which might otherwise go to children and
to the maintenance and strengthening of family relationships.
Naturally this
"merchandising institution culprit" is linked to the "financial
institution culprit." The wants that are cultivated and encouraged
by the merchandisers lead to the need for the easy credit that is
extended by the financials. The one-two punch works particularly
well on families. Children are often the prime target of advertisers
and parents overextend their credit to give their children things
to make up for the very time and attention they are putting elsewhere.
_________________
Next week: A
similar closer look at entertainment and media institutions, information
and communication institutions, and political and governmental institutions.
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© 2001 Meridian
Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
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