ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, August 4, 1996 TAG: 9608020062
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Job Security
SOURCE: JOHN LEVIN
John Sines said he voted last month to reject a labor contract between Rubatex Corp. and the United Steelworkers Union, even though the company threatened it would mean the loss of nearly 300 jobs from the Bedford plant, perhaps his.
Sines changed his mind a few days later when the union took a second vote on a contract that by next week will impose stiffer work rules for the rubber factory's 600 workers.
"I'm very loyal to the company," said Sines, who works in the plant's mill room where ingredients are mixed to produce rubber for consumer and industrial goods. "They're my life. But the only way I can make money is for them to make money," explaining his willingness to help turn around the company whose parent, RBX Corp., lost $2 million in the first three months of this year.
But for the past 13 years, Sines also has operated an auto garage as an after-hours sideline. "I thought about leaving and going full time in the transmission shop," he said.
What keeps him at Rubatex is five weeks of annual vacation and health insurance that he said would be too expensive to buy on his own.
Job security, despite 27 years with the company, was not even part of the equation, Sines said. Despite earning among the region's highest manufacturing wages at about $11.50 an hour, many Rubatex workers concluded that the Bedford plant's production and marketing problems left their jobs in doubt anyway, Sines said.
Job security is an oxymoron, said Marjorie Skidmore, the Virginia Employment Commission's job service manager in Roanoke.
The contradictory figure of speech hits home when she sees daily the human residue of corporate downsizing.
"You can look in the faces and see the level of anxiety," she said. "No matter how safe you think you are - in both public and private sectors - downsizing can reach out and grab you."
Workers readily acknowledge that the concept of long-term employment - working from graduation to retirement for a single company - no longer is reality. But actually facing the lack of company loyalty is very difficult, she said.
It also represents a "drastic change in an American social contract," said George Watson, an instructor at Virginia Tech's Pamplin College of Business who earned his doctorate this spring with research on workers' attitudes to downsizing.
Watson compared responses from workers at a Roanoke company undergoing fundamental organizational changes - which he would not identify - with those of employees of more stable companies in Northern Virginia.
The differences have implications not just for the companies but for workers' personal lives and health and the communities where they work, Watson said.
"People laboring under management they think is less concerned about their security are less likely to volunteer for community service and are less likely to recommend [the company] to others as a place to work," he said.
A prevailing sense of unfairness and injustice about downsizing sharply colored workers' perceptions of the Roanoke company undergoing changes and led to complaints about even unrelated issues, such as toilet paper in the company's restrooms and its phone service, Watson's research shows.
More significant, he said, is that the community in general suffers when the perception is that a downsizing was undertaken simply to make a profitable company more profitable.
"For those who leave the company and for those who continue, there's greater alienation toward the company," a loss of common civility and a reluctance to take part in community activities.
"They're very bitter," Skidmore said of people who've lost jobs for reasons other than their performance.
When they land their next jobs, they're often suspicious, wary and not as loyal.
"They'll give exactly what that job requires, but they're not as good employees as they were 10 years earlier. They're not saboteurs but many have lost their oomph. It's a management problem," she said.
Which probably explains why some companies are reluctant to hire victims of downsizing, Skidmore said. "They feel not only they'll cost them too much money but they'll bring their bitterness from their old job, a lot of baggage."
What will replace a traditional notion of loyalty in the American workplace will be shorter-term commitments between companies and individual employees, said Bruce Blaylock, dean of the college of business and economics at Radford University.
"It will be recognition that employees succeed only when the organization succeeds," he said. "It requires the organization to commit to the employee a certain amount of security based on performance."
And workers who survive, he said, will be those who are productive parts of the organization "who continuously improve the quality of its product or service at the lowest possible cost."
John Levin is business editor of The Roanoke Times. Call him at (540) 981-3345 or (800) 346-1234, ext. 345.
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