What ever happened to the golden rule?

That's what I often asked myself as I was researching my new book, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker. I often felt amazed, even appalled by the way many corporate managers treated their workers. It's understandable that corporate managers have grown tougher in recent decades because foreign competition and Wall Street have placed ever-fiercer pressures on companies to cut costs. But that hardly explains why so many managers seem to have grown downright callous and why so many treat their workers with a shocking lack of dignity.

Unfortunately, I found a disconcertingly large number of real-life examples to draw from as I was writing The Big Squeeze (for more information, see www.stevengreenhouse.com ), which seeks to explain the tough times that millions of American workers--white-collar and blue-collar, male and female, twenty-somethings and fifty-somethings--face as wages have stagnated, health and pension benefits have grown worse, job security has shriveled, and many workers have been pressured to work harder and faster.

One company fired a computer engineer on Take Your Daughters to Work Day as his eight-year-old daughter looked on. At Electronic Arts, the video games giant, some employees complained that they were required to work 30 days a month, 80 hours a week.


Then there's the worker at a dollar store in Brooklyn who told me that several female coworkers were fired simply because they missed work for a day or two to take care of a sick child. In Syracuse, I interviewed several women at a plastics factory who had grown furious because the male workers often groped them and asked for blow jobs while the women were tending the machinery. When these women complained to management, the factory's managers blew them off, taking a boys-will-be boys attitude.

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