COLUMN ONE : Swing Shift: the Change in U.S. Jobs : The outlook for employment falls into three views--the gloomy, the optimistic and the belief that Americans must prepare for more change, no matter what its form.

Tucked away in his speeches--not for debate or negotiation, but as simple serving of fact--is this from Bill Clinton: Americans, prepare to change careers seven times during your lives.

Easy for a Rhodes scholar to say, right? Particularly one who is a driven man and the most successful American politician of his generation.

What about the rest of us?

Within the working life span of Americans now on the job, the national approach to work, the goals of work, the idealization of careers and the definition of career success will be reshaped by the mighty robot arms and liquid crystals of change.

“We are living through a transformation that will rearrange the politics and economics of the coming century.” Thus begins the premise of one of the most talked-about public policy books of the moment: “The Work of Nations,” by Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich, one of the guiding employment theorists of the Clinton Administration.

For the most part, this transformation is happening without broad social debate, without consultation and usually without our consent. And it’s happening ever faster, perhaps too fast.

Will our lives be diminished? Or enriched?

The answers, insofar as the tendrils of understanding seem within grasp, are thrilling. And chilling.

For those purposes, the story begins in 1945. At the end of World War II, Americans embarked on the good times of the victors. They took up their occupations, joined companies or unions or started businesses, and strived both for advancement and security. Seniority brought prestige and extra vacation.

Many people did not achieve this goal, but it nonetheless fixed itself in the mind as the American ideal.

Then came upheavals in blue-collar industries, and now in the white-collar work force. The goal of career stability has given way to this squirming python called global competition.

For some, the change has been exhilarating. Billionaires emerged from such industries as computer software. The roughly 2,200 founding employees at Microsoft in Redmond, Wash., are now millionaires thanks to their stock options, according to some reports.

For many others, the change has been a grim treadmill downward. Families are stressed, dreams darkened and self-esteem compromised. History will show that after three generations of effort to improve themselves, countless millions of American workers saw their wages, benefits and stability challenged by everything from modern factory robotics to the indentured and calloused hands of the Third World.

Between 1975 and 1990, the 500 largest U.S. industrial companies failed to add any American jobs. In 1970, the U.S. ranked first among nations in gross domestic product per capita. Now it has fallen to ninth.

Even the healthiest companies have engaged in large-scale downsizing. General Electric, for example, reduced its work force during the 1980s by more than 25%--or 100,000 workers--and saw revenues rise from $26 billion to $60 billion. GE even squeezed out a 3% profit during the depths of the 1991 recession.

So far in 1993, Americans have seen two disturbing occurrences: An economic rebound not matched by an employment rebound, and a rapid and disproportionate spread of part-time or contract workers who are being paid less, earning fewer benefits and enjoying no promises of security.

What’s ahead?

To make a stab at answers, The Times interviewed a range of thinkers and asked opinions of those caught in the turbulence, including workers, the unemployed, executives, counselors, economists, theologians, labor leaders, futurists and academics.

Although not always an easy fit, their opinions fell into three general views of this new American employment destiny: the gloomy, the optimistic and the belief that Americans must prepare for more change, no matter what its form.

*

First, the gloomy.

Social scientists call it the core and ring strategy. Throw out the big vertical pyramid where we all loyally work our way up. Instead, a shrinking number of essential employees at the core of a company share in its creativity and success while a ring of detached, dehumanized workers labor on the fringes to be hired, fired and replaced in response to the subtlest vibrations of change in the marketplace.

While investors and the business press generally applaud such moves, the resulting system mocks the American ideal of shared benefit and sacrifice. Thus, Boeing announces a reduction of 28,000 jobs and a nearly simultaneous allocation of a $554,000 bonus to its chairman, Frank Schrontz, pushing his annual pay to $2 million-plus.

As many can attest out on the rings, this new economic order means the erosion of almost everything that made a job more than just work: security, wages, health benefits, pensions, the ability to save for vacation or a child’s education, not to mention the immeasurable satisfaction of belonging to a team and heading toward a goal.

As a result, employees respond with a corresponding detachment in their work. Companies must then invent new controls against mischief or sloth.

And this happens at the little businesses the same as the large. At the Olde N’awlins Cookery in the French Quarter of New Orleans, the bartender is so busy pushing beeping buttons on the tamper-proof controlled drink dispenser that he has not a second to hear about the hard day suffered by his customers. Proprietor G. Michael Lala gives dissatisfied customers a shrug and the explanation that he is saddled with bad employees.

A Watch on Workers

“What we have emerging is a service society that is highly regimented. We will have to see more and more extensive controls on employees,” says Harley Shaiken, visiting professor of industrial relations at UC Berkeley.

“Bank of America’s recent decision to make more tellers part-time instead of full-time was, to B of A, a sound cost-cutting move. But one can expect the employees to reciprocate in kind.”

Meanwhile, production jobs--no surprise here--face similar pressures.

In a study called “Workforce 2000,” the Indianapolis think tank, the Hudson Institute, projected a loss of 2.2 million manufacturing jobs this decade, with the biggest declines in metals, textiles and automobiles. For the first time, this would reduce manufacturing to a less important part of the American economy than finance, real estate and insurance.

Unemployed white-collar factory worker Janie W. Johnson describes today’s industrial Monopoly board in her community of Greenville, Miss. The old Boeing plant is now being used by a local manufacturer, but the Schwinn plant is abandoned and empty. Fruit of the Loom has taken over the Vlasic pickle factory, but it is offering only minimum-wage jobs. Chico Rice is gone, but Uncle Ben’s rice stays. And the Comet Rice plant has been taken over by the Cargill Inc. conglomerate. Johnson is going to interview out at Cargill but cannot remember what it makes.

Who can blame her?

The global market, it seems, is pricing down jobs and careers the same as it is goods and services.

“Very dramatically, jobs are being priced to an international standard. In particular, blue-collar jobs are being marked down to a price that’s globally competitive,” warns Edward E. Lawler II, founder of the USC Center for Effective Organizations.

Outside the mainstream of economic doctrine, some Americans are urging revolutionary changes in American thinking to meet these global changes.

One is John B. Cobb Jr., a Claremont theologian and co-author, with World Bank economist Herman E. Daly, of a prize-winning book that re-examines jobs and trade: “For the Common Good.”

“Authentic free trade is between people who are free to trade or not to trade,” he said in an interview. He believes that nations should trade goods only for goods of equal value, thereby eliminating the flow of capital to places where wages, environmental controls and worker safety are lowest.

“Today, transnational corporations are free to trade without government restriction. And that doesn’t impress me as having any great moral stature.”

*

Now for the cheery view.

The most frequently voiced antidote to all the infectious worry is America’s indomitable faith in itself, in its determination to blaze the path of innovation and technology, pursuing more trade not less.

“We know that economic growth depends as never before on opening up new markets overseas and expanding the volume of world trade . . . ,” Clinton said in his February economic address to Congress. “The world is changing so fast that we must have aggressive, targeted attempts to create the high-wage jobs of the future; that’s what our competitors are doing.”

Thomas Kochan, a professor of industrial relations at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sketches his view that an American resurgence is achievable but that it will require steps bolder than the nation has been willing to take in recent decades.

He lists three requirements:

* New, vastly expanded and unceasing worker training must be instituted, not just for the benefit of individual companies but for the common good of modern mobile workers.

* Employees must be given a stronger voice in the workplace, revolutionizing labor-management relations.

* The entwined benefit systems of pensions, health care and vacations must be redesigned to protect Americans against the coming pace of job turnover.

“If we don’t take such major changes, you can mark me down as on the pessimistic side,” says Kochan.

“But the reason I’m still optimistic is that enough people share a recognition of what needs to be done--corporate executives, trade union leaders, government officials and informed professionals. And it seems like we’re building the political will to get on with it.”

For the experts, technology and innovation command center stage. But most experts also think that many of tomorrow’s jobs will look surprisingly much like today’s, even if new mobility will be required.

Compared to demand for computer analysts between now and 2005, for instance, the United States will need twice as many schoolteachers, three times as many nurses and five times as many retail clerks, according to the Labor Department’s 1992 job forecast.

In fact, America will need more gardeners than computer programmers in the next dozen years.

If that future does not particularly excite you, here is one that may: In the nooks and crannies of America is a fresh surge in small-scale, community-rooted entrepreneurial enterprises that holds the promise of global competitiveness while at the same time increasing community spirit and providing human-scale workplaces.

A Fresher Approach

Take the Red Hook Brewery in Seattle. The company is a pioneer in the spread of small breweries across America.

Beer, like bread and fish, is a commodity that requires freshness and care in handling, something done most efficiently at the community level. Ask any Northwest drinker: Small breweries produce beer that tastes, well, like beer used to.

This is not a Space-Age concept. Before this century, practically every town had its own breweries and big cities had them in every neighborhood. They offered a variety of malts and ales and bocks and porters and pilseners. Giant brewers moved in and almost entirely displaced community breweries. Variety was replaced with a uniform pale lager and competition turned to price and image.

Foreign brewers filled a niche market for higher quality beverages, although beer typically suffers from long-distance travel.

In the last eight years, resurgent American micro and specialty brewers have increased production from 75,000 to 1.2 million barrels.

Red Hook alone has gone from 1,000 barrels that first year to 70,000 now. It currently employs 40 people and has gained enormous community identification.

At that scale, work has elements of participation and fun that are lost in larger companies.

Red Hook President Paul Shipman: “We don’t need motivational speakers. People here get stock options after two years. . . . And if you asked them to draw an organizational chart, I think everybody here would have it differently. The only thing we are rigid about is the quality of the beer.”

He believes that it will only be a matter of time--and a short time--before local breweries displace virtually all foreign imports. He calculates that this could add some 50,000 high-quality jobs to the American work force.

Beyond beer, Shipman sees similar potential in the demand for fresh local bagels, for locally made bicycles and for any number of goods.

These are exciting days for people like Shipman. “We hear that the high-paying jobs are disappearing. But I’ll tell you what are disappearing: the jobs of the 20th Century. The jobs that are being substituted are the jobs of the 21st Century, and the 21st Century hasn’t even started yet. So in many cases, the pay is starting low.

“But the potential is high. In the 21st Century, the production of technology will not be the engine of progress. The production of technology will be low-paying. Computer engineers will be like railroad engineers of the 20th Century. The engine of progress in the 21st Century will be the application of technology.”

*

The third view comes from those struggling with the process of change, no matter which way the future goes.

Virtually everyone interviewed for this story professed the belief that there will be more job turmoil, less security ahead. And they all said that workers owe it to themselves to prepare, just as corporations do.

Joel Fadem of the UCLA Institute of Industrial Relations says that the challenge facing Americans reminds him of the Irish fable “about the man who stopped a farmer to ask directions to another village. The farmer said, quite sincerely: ‘It’s only 20 miles away, but if I were you I wouldn’t start from here.’

“Similarly declaring we are in a state of transition is not a source of comfort. . . . Just how we get there from here is an uncertain but unavoidable task.”

And it is sure to cause even greater social discomfort.

A study of 27,871 Americans released last December by the St. Paul Fire & Marine Insurance Co. found that among life’s personal problems, employment and financial stress is No. 1 and so difficult to manage that it often spirals into deeper troubles.

One indicator: “Nearly twice as many people report back pain when their job is creating problems in their personal life than when it is not.”

In 1990, the journal American Psychologist published a 314-page rundown of the challenges facing psychologists as they try to help the rest of us cope with the changes that are “radically altering the traditional face and place of work in the United States.”

Going With the Flow

Naturally, no professional will succeed for long telling Americans: ‘Forget it, pal, there’s no future in your future.’ So a feel-good, be-good school is taking root in the slipstream of today’s turbulent changes.

“If things are changing, you can stay stuck and be changed on top of. Or you can change with things and try to come out on top,” says attorney Deborah Arron, author of “Running From the Law.” She travels the country telling laid-off or dissatisfied lawyers that they will emerge happier and healthier.

Her proof?

“Only once in my life have I had a laid-off worker come to me and say: ‘Help me find exactly the same job I just left.’ ”

David Goodenough is a mental-health and career-development counselor in Seattle. He sees a counterproductive cycle at work in the accelerating pace of job change. As workers gain in age and seniority, they grow conservative to protect themselves. They cease to be creative or take risks, but the result is the opposite of what they intended: They make themselves less productive and more vulnerable to layoffs.

He advises workers to “practice risks” at their jobs, which might prevent them from being laid off or at least will limber them up for the challenges of the next job. He says that all workers, even those who feel accomplished and secure, should think about change--keeping networking lists, staying abreast of parallel career opportunities and planning ways to bridge from one job to the next.

Yes, he says, accepting change is much easier for some personality types than for others.

To those who fear job turmoil the most, Goodenough recalls the advice of a friend who was admired by all for his ability to appear to move happily through life no matter what.

“I asked him his secret. He said: ‘Don’t sweat the small stuff.’ ”

What’s the small stuff?

“Everything.”

Times researcher Doug Conner contributed to this story.

Changes in the Work Force

The rate of growth in various U.S. jobs between 1984 and the year 2000, as projected in a study by the Hudson Institute:

of jobs in ’84 Growth by year 2000 Lawyers and judges 457,000 71% Natural, computer mathematical scientists 647,000 68 Health 2,478,000 53 Technicians 3,146,000 44 Other professionals and paraprofessionals 825,000 43 Engineers, architects and surveyors 1,447,000 41 Social scientists 173,000 40 Managerial 10,893,000 39 Marketing and sales 10,656,000 39 Writers, artists entertainers and athletes 1,092,000 39 Service occupations 16,059,000 37 Teachers, librarians and counselors 4,437,000 31 Social, recreational and religious workers 759,000 31 Mechanics, installers 4,264,000 23 Administrative support 18,483,000 20 Construction trades 3,127,000 19 Transportation and heavy- equipment operators 4,604,000 16 Plant and system workers 275,000 13 Helpers and laborers 4,168,000 5 Precision production workers 2,790,000 2 Blue-collar supervisors 1,442,000 0 Hand workers, assemblers and fabricators 2,604,000 -7 Machine setters, operators and tenders 5,527,000 -8 Agriculture, forestry, fisheries 4,480,000 -12 Miners 175,000 -16

Note: Study released in 1987. Model used to project rates of growth shows those figures have changed little or not at all in 1993.

Source: Hudson Institute