A panel on CNBC this afternoon made the case—a stretch, maybe, but not unconvincing—that the Slater story resonated with stressed-out American workers generally. As David Leonhardt has written in the New York Times, one of the distinctive marks of this recession is that unemployment has hit a fairly narrow group, but hit them very deeply. In other words, there hasn’t been a lot of churn in the job market; rather, people who have lost their jobs just tend to stay unemployed a long, long time, while people who kept their jobs through the crash have (compared with previous recessions) largely stayed employed.
The flip side is that, if you have one of those jobs, you’re often expected to do more and more to push productivity up, while wages have stagnated—and you need to put up with that if you don’t want to become one of the perma-unemployed. The latest economic news, however, has been that productivity gains have suddenly stalled: in other words, more and more companies may finally have wrung all the work they can out of their exhausted staff.
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