Testifying Before Congress

The following contains an excerpt from a 1978 testimony before Congress on “Public policy and the future of work and retirement”. At the time, Ronna (then Ronna Klingenberg) was Project Director of the American Council of Life Insurance in Washington, DC.

Mr. ROONEY. Our first witness this morning is Ms. Ronna Klingenberg, director of the trend analysis program of the American Council of Life Insurance.

I must apologize to the witnesses today because the Commerce Committee goes into session at 10, and will probably take up three railroad bills from the subcommittee which I chair. I am hopeful that one of my colleagues will be here to chair the rest of this hearing. As soon as my bills are reported out of the committee, I will return to this hearing.

You may proceed, Ms. Klingenberg.

STATEMENT OF RONNA KLINGENBERG, TAP PROJECT DIRECTOR. AMERICAN COUNCIL OF LIFE INSURANCE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

Ms. KLINGENBERG. Thank you very much. Good morning and happy Sun Day.

The American Council of Life Insurance began the trend analysis program about 10 years ago. I think we are very proud of our efforts to think about and react to emerging issues. This does not mean that the council necessarily supports the current or any future legislative policy that might be suggested by my remarks.

Since you are going to be hearing testimony by expert witnesses on the specific areas of interest later today, I have been asked to provide an overview of work related trends that may be important in the next 30 years.

I hope to concentrate on four broad areas:

The composition of the labor force is of utmost importance in policy considerations. I know that you are all familiar with the demographics and the long-range projections of a larger percentage of older workers in the labor force.

I don’t have to talk to you about demographic considerations of the labor force. But I would like to talk about the attitudes toward work that these new workers may hold, since attitudes toward work in the year 2008 may not resemble in the slightest the work ethic of today.

We all know that young workers in 1978 have different attitudes toward work than did their parents who were scarred by the depression and who value job security above all else. According to the Institute for Social Research, younger workers have the highest rates of expressed dissatisfaction with their jobs, the highest rates of job seeking and of unscheduled absences from work, and the largest population by age of those who change occupational category. Nationwide attitude surveys performed by the council confirm that people have become more cynical about the work ethic over the past decade.

Research undertaken for the council the Corporate Priorities Division of Yankelovich, Skelly, and White, indicates that there are significant changes in work values in what they call the new workers.

This research finds that these new workers have a growing acceptance of values which focus on self, what Tom Wolfe has called the me generation. This includes less automatic acceptance of authority, reduced willingness to sacrifice today for tomorrow, more concern about the content of work, and more concern about whether the requirements of one’s job coincide with one’s personal self-fulfillment goals.

The baby-boom workers who tend to hold these new attitudes toward work will represent one-quarter of the labor force by the year 1980. There are those who contend that these workers will soften as they age, and that their attitudes will eventually become more congruent with older workers of today. I don’t think that will be the case. I think that these workers will retain the values the have now and will continue to demand more participation in work decisions and more flexibility in their working environment. These demands could simmer for 30 years and become even more serious when strain is added by the demographic pressures that will be present in the year 2008.

As the baby-boom generation moves into middle management through the 1380’s and 1990’s, there will be a 70 percent labor force participation rate by women according to some estimates, depending on who you ask. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has always been low and they estimate 50 percent. Chase Econometrics estimate 70 percent.

In 1984 there will be more college-educated people with different expectations about careers, and there very well may be more older Americans staying on in senior management positions. With all this in mind, it is not surprising that Eli Ginzburg has stated that the availability of good jobs will become a central issue of public policy.

I agree. I think the definition of a good job is changing and will continue to change in the next 30 years.

We might also expect that there will be increasing numbers of overqualified workers with poor work morale who haven’t been able to get what they define as good jobs.

Today we talk about a career ladder and think of workers progressing up the ladder one rung at a time. But in 1990 the baby-boom cohort will be stuck in the middle. They may be cut off from the top of the ladder by older workers staying in top jobs and affecting promotion patterns, and at the same time these workers may be pulled toward the bottom of the ladder into entry-level positions that are available because of the baby bust or the shortage of labor resulting from falling birth rates after the baby boom. This could mean that many workers may be caught in white collar jobs that have limited autonomy and room for growth and that as a result the distinction between white and blue collar jobs will continue to blur.

The impact of these trends? There are forecasters who predict this will spark intergenerational conflict over jobs. Others, including Arnold Weber who writes for the Wall Street Journal, suggest that these workers may become unhappy and may eventually turn into what he calls a white collar proletariat. Many agree that at the minimum, these frustrations will lead to a sharp rise in white collar unionization and a new generation of activist union leaders who will take stronger stands on social and quality of life issues.

The second work-related area of importance in policy considerations is the education of the citizens of 2008. Many agree that our society is becoming more and more information-oriented. There are people who talk about the knowledge revolution. One writer in the Futurist magazine contends that 97 percent of everything known in the world will have been learned since the time a child is born, if you are talking about a child born today. This may be an overstatement, but it leads me to feel that reeducation is going to become more important in the future.

I have seen other estimates that skilled workers will have to be retrained as many as four times in their career. There are resently some workers in graphics unions who are being retrained almost that many times.

One thing that bothers me is the office of the future. Writers who describe the office of the future describe communication technologies and computer conferencing where people type messages and it goes through a central machine and communicates via video display. These sophisticated technologies depend on very basic skills, the skills to read and write.

I don’t know that we can assume that all these skills will be available to workers in the year 2008. It may be by that year we will have created an information elite.

I saw in a Washington Post article last Sunday that the National Assessment of Educational Progress estimated that 42 percent of all black 17 year olds are functionally illiterate. While that figure may be too high, it still indicates that in 2008 there will be a group of 47 year olds who will live in society without the means to participate in the exchange of information—an exchange that gains in importance with every passing year.

This raises the question of whether or not we may be creating an information elite—with the well-informed getting better informed and the poorly informed getting further behind. As an aside, I think this is important in considering leisure time because educational preparation is essential for productive use of leisure time. Leaders of volunteer groups are anticipating a decline in voluntarism as women enter the labor market and so far we have no one else to turn to for these activities.

In the work environment there are a lot of issues that I don’t have time to address: the internationalization of work—including exporting jobs—facilities location planning, and democracy in the workplace.

I would like to concentrate on the field of occupational medicine which is expected to become more sophisticated, particularly in areas such as psychology. Workers have been increasingly sensitized to the hazards of the workplace through the grim toll taken by long-term exposure to carcinogens and other chemicals whose long-term effects are slowly becoming known.

In the council’s trend analysis program we have seen an unusual amount of material on stress and quite a bit of that material links stress to the concept of occupational hazard. Since workers are more cautious about environmental hazards, it could be that reports linking stress to illnesses as serious as heart disease and cancer have been the impetus pushing joggers onto running paths and tense executives into EST seminars and rebirthing chambers.

We can expect that this awareness of stress as hazard will lead to greater demands on employers for exercise facilities and time to apply stress-relieving techniques such as prayer and meditation.

The final area of concern for policymakers thinking about the future of work is the change in support systems available to workers away from work—in other words, alterations in the family, neighborhood, religious groups, and other groups that provide emotional support.

Changes in each of these groups become more important as others change. For example, it is expected that by the turn of the century the average worker may change jobs as many as seven or eight times during the course of his or her career instead of staying with one or two jobs as was the case not that many years ago. For many workers, jobs provide a link to everyday reality and perform functions similar to neighborhoods—coworkers remember birthdays, call when someone is ill and offer friendship and a sense of belonging.

If a worker changes jobs frequently and moves to follow the Sun or job opportunity an gets divorced or decides to live alone and loses contact with old friends—Alvin Toffler’s phrase Future Shock is a mild description of the disorientation that the worker is likely to feel. This will create a great need for new support structures to replace the old ones that have fallen away.

I saw an interesting comment by Karl Menninger that the boom in CB radios was a result of the deterioration of old support systems and an effort to replace those systems with another way to reach out and find contact with other citizens.

A futurist, who is well known but who asked not to be named, expressed to me the fear that the greatest potential problem of this feeling of rootlessness is that if a majority of people feel rootless they are very vulnerable to manipulation by political and religious leaders who would tell them what to do and how to do it.

Since the most recent trend analysis program report was on death, dying and life extension, I have been asked to conclude my remarks by commenting on how attitudes toward death and dying will change the world of work in the future. I have attached a copy of that report to my written testimony so I won’t go into detail at this time.

Perhaps the most important example of changing attitudes toward death and dying is the recent popularity of the hospice. The hospice, developed in England, is an institution designed solely to offer care for the terminally ill.

The concept started in England 10 years ago and there are over 70 hospices in the United States today and more support for them. I think there are two reasons: People want treatment from institutions that are the appropriate scale for their needs and they want to feel that even in dying they can have a measure of control over the life that remains.

As it becomes easier to talk about death, because of hospices, death education and the life-after-life movement, we may lose our fear of older people as reminders of our own mortality. This new pragmatism about death could help us stop isolating the elderly and help us learn to value their wisdom.

I did a scenario for this TAP report on the year 2000. In the scenario, I forecast rising suicide rates and social approval of active euthanasia. I think if through the work of this committee and other efforts on the behalf of all Americans, we can learn to integrate work, education and leisure into a meaningful experience for all of us, that scenario won’t come true.

I will be happy to answer any questions.

Mr. ROONEY. TAP 16, Death, Dying and Life Extension, will become part of this record, Ms. Klingenberg. Thank you.

Mr. ROONEY. I wonder if you would tell the committee whether or not you believe that the desire of many older people to remain in the work force past the traditional retirement age, accompanied by the chronic problem of unemployment, is likely to produce some sort of intergenerational competition for jobs?

Ms. KLINGENBERG. I think it could. I look back thinking about the baby-boom cohort.

Mr. ROONEY. What are you talking about?

Ms. KLINGENBERG. The children born after 1946.

Mr. ROONEY. 1946 to what?

Ms. KLINGENBERG. Almost 1960. The inelegant phrase has been used that the baby-boom cohort is like a pig moving through a boa constrictor, that that big lump will cause problems all down the line. I think you have to pay particular attention to what Peter Drucker called the class of 1968. The generation that was turning campuses upside down in the late 1960’s may turn the workplace upside down in the late 1980’s or early 1990’s because of the competition they see.

Mr. ROONEY. What do you think Congress should do?

Ms. KLINGENBERG. You are going to hear testimony today from Fred Best on flexible life scheduling and patterns. I think that is one way to avoid this conflict. If you make it possible for people to get in and out of the labor market with more ease instead of restricting them to 365 days a year and 9-to-5 jobs; I think some pressure will be released. I think you will be taking off the top of the steam cooker.

Mr. ROONEY. Do you know of any examples of areas or industries in which jobs are being redistributed through a variety of work sharing policies?

Ms. KLINGENBERG. There are experiments that are being undertaken by specific corporations, but I know of no industrywide attempts in this area.

Mr. ROONEY. Are they meeting with any kind of success?

Ms. KLINGENBERG. It depends on how you judge it. Of course, there is union opposition to some of these experiments because of controversy over benefit payments, but they seem to be meeting with success in that productivity is higher if you have workers who are only working when they want to work. These experiments also have success in employing members of the community who would otherwise not be employed in full time jobs.

For example, a couple of corporations are using working mothers who don’t want to be away from home after 2 or 3 in the afternoon and teenagers who are having a lot of trouble finding work.

When you consider the social cost of unemployment it is impor- tant to have as many people involved in these experiments as possible. There was some testimony before the Joint Economic Committee, by Harvey Brenner of Johns Hopkins University, last year on the social cost of unemployment. His estimate was that for every 1 percent increase in the rate of unemployment we can expect an additional 30,000 cardiovascular deaths a year, an increase in mental hospital admissions for that year and the next 5 years and also an increase in homicide rates.

So I think that adds to the value of these experiments.

Mr. ROONEY. Mr. Biaggi?

Mr. BIAGGI. You stated that the composition of tomorrow’s work force is as important as its numbers and its proportions and you spoke specifically of one’s expressed dissatisfaction with one’s job. I think that is almost always constant, but it may be exacerbated with the passage of time.

What do you believe the Congress can do about that?

Ms. KLINGENBERG. I noticed that there have been 2,000 surveys done in the last 10 years on job satisfaction so obviously there is conflicting data.

One thing I think Congress can do about it is try to be more responsive to some of the local efforts to think about these issues. Yesterday I saw a report that had been done by the Iowa committee for the year 2000 on work retirement and leisure. I think as long as you are responsive to the input of local groups, you have a chance of considering these impacts when you create a specific piece of legislation.

Did that not answer your question?

Mr. BIAGGI. It responds to the question, but it doesn’t provide us with the solution.

Ms. KLINGENBERG. Futurists don’t provide solutions. We look in the crystal ball and ask the questions.

Mr. BIAGGI. You make reference to job satisfaction and a statement that people will refuse to be part of the whole production in modern times or the modern times concept of activity, and people will be reluctant to continue in that area. What do you suggest as alternatives?

Ms. KLINGENBERG. I think we are already seeing a couple of things happen. There is a disagreement among social scientists about the argument between workers as a production unit and the need for humanization of work. They are thinking about workers in two ways.

I think workers will continue to stay on the job and be dissatisfied, but there is some indication that there are jobs that are considered society’s dirty work, that you can have a high rate of unemployment in jobs that are not being filled because of attitudes toward work.

Mr. BIAGGI. What happened to the old concept that if it is honest labor and if you do it well, it is something to be proud of.

Ms. KLINGENBERG. That is what we call the work ethic and I think that is disappearing. I don’t think people feel that way anymore. Let me put it this way: I think more people don’t feel that way now. I think the numbers of people who are rejecting the work ethic are rising. At least that is what we see in our data.

Mr. BIAGGI. We see an erosion of the work ethic. That is fairly apparent. I think there is an impact on the whole Nation that is severely negative.

Ms. KLINGENBERG. Aside from questions like productivity which is one that I know your committee and others have been very involved with.

Mr. RODNEY. The gentleman from Connecticut, Mr. Sarasin.

Mr. SARASIN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Miss Klingenberg, in response to your question to Congressman Biaggi, you talked about erosion of the work ethic. How much of that problem is caused by the Congress itself or the action that we take in providing jobs?

Ms. KLINGENBERG. You would find people that say it is happening because of transfer payments, that because it is possible to not work and still exist, people don’t value work in the same way. I think that any time you have a shift in the economy, there is going to be a shift in attitudes toward work. That is why I mentioned the depression as a primary reason for the attitudes of older workers toward jobs.

Young people today grew up in an era of affluence. It is easier for them to think about personal fulfillment than job security. So that anything you do to give them a net to fall back on will make it possible for them not to work and to be more concerned about these other issues. This will contribute to the attitudes we are facing today.

Mr. SARASIN. Are we really compounding the problem by continuing some of our grand schemes?

Ms. KLINGENBERG. I think perhaps you might want better coordination of the grand schemes. If there is anything I want to get across today it is that society can be thought of as fabric and if you pull one thread, you have to think about what you are doing to the rest of the threads.

For example, Government support of the family in one way or another will affect worker attitudes. Educational policies will affect worker attitudes. You can’t think about these things in a vacuum. You have to be responsive to all the potential impacts instead of a straight-line-trend extrapolation.

Mr. SARASIN. What do you suggest we do?

Ms. KLINGENBERG. I suggest you pay more attention to the good futures research going on around here. You have good people at the Library of Congress, the Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future, and there are a lot of citizens groups, such as the Dallas 2,000. I think all these people are raising the questions that need to be considered. I think that perhaps if you focus on today alone, you are going to get further and further behind.

Mr. SARASIN. I certainly would agree with you. I am rather pleased that this committee is just about the only one making any attempt to deal with the future and try to look ahead in the areas of our jurisdiction. I have found that the hearings that we have held on this subject to be in some cases very enlightening and in others extremely frightening.

Ms. KLINGENBERG. I think my statement today was very optimistic which shows you how frightening the picture may be. I did not say anything about energy resource shortage which will affect worker attitudes. I did not say anything about possible economic displacements. I left a lot of things out that could influence the future. I think perhaps my statement is one of the most optimistic that can be considered.

Mr. SARASIN. Are we going to make it?

Ms. KLINGENBERG. Since I plan to be around in 2008, I hope so.

Mr. SARASIN. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. ROONEY. Thank you, Mr. Sarasin. You referred in your statement to hospices. Do we have them in this area?

Ms. KLINGENBERG. Yes, we do. HEW funds several hospices. There is one being considered in Washington, the Vince Lombardi Center at Georgetown University Hospital. I don’t think it is operational yet.

Mr. ROONEY. That is the only one in this area?

Ms. KLINGENBERG. That I know of in the near area.

Mr. ROONEY. It is funded by HEW?

Ms. KLINGENBERG. I don’t know if that one gets all its funds by HEW. Many are funded by the National Cancer Institute. Hospices perform an important function in the community. There is a woman, named Dr. Cicely Saunders, who revitalized the hospice concept in England 10 years ago. Hospices take in patients who are clearly terminal, there is no hope for them. The hospices concentrate on providing emotional support and sophisticated pain-relieving technology. Hospices use heroin, allow pets and children to come and visit the patients. Patients are allowed to stay up all hours, play bingo, and get their hair done. The hospices offer grief counseling for the patient, and for the community, and family so it is not a sterile or technological death.

The attempt is to allow terminal patients to die with dignity in a way most appropriate for them. I think it is very valuable since I think it is going to remove some of the fear of death we have now.

Mr. ROONEY. How many are there in the country?

Ms. KLINGENBERG. Over 70 at last count, but they are growing very quickly.

Mr. ROONEY. These are old mansions or old houses?

Ms. KLINGENBERG. Sometimes. They are talking now about including hospice units in hospital facilities, but as a separate ward because the two concepts are a little different. Hospitals fight death. They spend all their energy trying to conquer death. Hospices accept it. Because of that difference in philosophies they are usually separate.

Mr. ROONEY. Very interesting. Thank you very much for your testimony this morning.

Ms. KLINGENBERG. Thank you.