Culturally, both within large organizations and among individuals, we have been reluctant to face this reality head-on. Even though we are constantly confronted with the news that the middle-management class is dwindling away, and though we often give lip service to the idea that it's true, as a nation of workers we have either been unwilling or unable to process the recent structural changes that are not the by-products of another business cycle. One way or another, we keep hearkening back to the hope that contract work as a lifestyle will end when companies start hiring people back on a permanent basis. In the face of stubbornly high unemployment, even our government clings to the belief that it can create jobs. This view, however, can only result in a failure to act that will ultimately eclipse the career of any executive who does not recognize the imperative to prepare for employer-employee relationships of an entirely different order. A brief overview of how those changes have occurred should convince even the most resistant among us of the need to accept that executives today are faced with an entirely new, wholly in-evitable, business situation.
The Origins of Lifetime Employment
From the earliest beginnings of our industrialized society, labor has played a critical role in shaping the way business is conducted. Not only have laborers been relied upon to produce a product, but as the famed apostle of mass production, Henry Ford, recognized, laborers constituted the primary customer base for the products they produced. With one bold stroke, Ford raised the wages of his workers to five dollars a day, thus guaranteeing that his own labor force would be a major market for the very cars they produced. What started out, however, as a means to spur consumerism soon backfired on Ford in ways he least expected. Ford's wage increases spawned a tremendous demand by the labor unions for high wages, benefits, and job security-the true ramifications of which would be masked by the ups and downs of industrial business cycles throughout the twentieth century. In principle and in practice, however, it marked the beginning of a capitalistic welfare state, which raised the expectations of all workers to include the belief that if you worked hard the organization would take care of you for the rest of your life.
By the 1950s, the post-World War II economic boom had set the stage for the covenant of lifetime employment to become a given in the workplace. The United States, whose economy had been built up and positioned to defeat the Axis powers, had emerged from the war as the major relatively un-scarred industrial society. A large workforce returning from the war was more than willing to subscribe to the covenant of hard work in exchange for job security and the good life. The national workforce snapped up the products they produced at an unprecedented pace-propelling the United States to center stage as the world's premier supplier of consumer goods. At the same time, however, a new factor-technology-was added, which in and of itself had hit its stride and had begun to evolve during the war.
For two decades, Mr. Ford's formula worked beyond his wildest dreams, allowing the United States to dominate the economic world, achieve the full benefits of lifetime employment, and make money hand over fist. However, throughout this entire time, the sleeper of the century-technology-was sneaking through our back door. Though the full effects of rapidly advancing technology were far from clear at the time, technology was present and would forever alter the shape of the nature of work in every sphere of the marketplace.
