Fat and mean: the corporate squeeze of working Americans and the myth of managerial "downsizing"

发表于：Choice Reviews Online · 年份：1996 · DOI：10.5860/choice.34-1042 · 被引用次数：334 · 研究领域：Employment and Welfare Studies、Organizational Downsizing and Restructuring

Since the early 1980s, economic experts have recommended downsizing as the best way for U.S. corporations to remain competitive. Reducing unnecessary staff would lower costs, increase profits, and transform these companies into lean, mean production machines. As many American businesses pursued this strategy— often in the wake of mergers and acquisitions that left them with an unwieldy layer of middle management— and raised their bottom line, it seemed the experts were right. Yet as David M. Gordon shows in this iconoclastic book, most of them have really only gone halfway. They are mean, but far from lean. Tracing the overall employment patterns of the past decade, Gordon shows that most American companies actually employ more managers and supervisors than ever before. These ever-increasing functionaries control company payrolls and pay themselves generous salaries— at the expense of average workers. For despite a steadily growing economy the real wages of the American worker have been falling for the past 20 years. To explain this decline and the much-debated wage gap that resulted, pundits and professors invoke various causes ranging from the flow of production jobs overseas to the average worker's lack of the technological skills needed in today's knowledge economy. But Gordon exposes the single greatest factor in this decline, a corporate strategy that penalizes line workers and hinders businesses from competing effectively in world markets: the simultaneous overstaffing...