Book Review: The Disposable American

"There's no question we don't have the hegemony we once had, and we're not going to reverse the global economy and layoffs," Uchitelle tells me. "But we can recognize what we've done and what the real costs are."

The book holds that three myths allow layoffs to be seen as a margin-boosting panacea rather than a sign of corporate and social malady.

The first is that all these layoffs will eventually result in a revitalized corporate America. But even as profit margins grow, there is no end to the firings of working- or professional-class employees. And, he argues, this level of instability will eventually hurt companies.

"What started as a legitimate response to America's declining hegemony has become an unending, debilitating condition," he adds.

The second myth Uchitelle examines is that the laid-off must save themselves. In the face of corporations bent on using only the cheapest workers, no amount of job training or extra education will make a personnel professional in Manhattan as desirable as one who lives in a cheaper city.

In the book, Uchitelle uses Citigroup (C Quote) as an example, a company that farmed out call-center work to people in Dublin, Ireland, and eventually did away with the very human resources team that had helped employees deal with the fact that their jobs had been outsourced. These professionals face a bleak future, he contends, given the fact that their skill level would not save them from a corporation that embraced layoffs as the ultimate solution.

The third myth, he contends, is that the merits of layoffs are entirely measurable in dollars and cents. Americans are trained to think of our worth in terms of the fact that we can work, he shows, and destabilizing that part of ourselves, he argues, destabilizes more than just our economy.