Shut the door behind you. Have a seat. It’s time for you, the boss, to hear what’s stirring out in the cubicles.
You might pay attention if you think happy workers make a difference.
Seems the troops are learning to live witth their layoff fears. Seems they think they are working hard nowadays, and truly helping the companyt. Seems they understand the company’s new talk about being rewarded for doing a good job, and not for sitting around.
But it also seems that they feel like they have received little payback for their efforts. We are not just talking here about good raises, but the other doodads that make a job feel good: benefits, promotions, working conditions.
How do we know so? We have in our hands a nationwide survey by Towers Perrin, the second such survey by the management consulting firm in two years dealing with employee attitudes on their work environment.
The last survey showed marked concern about layoffs. This time, the survey indicated a gap between workers’ and bosses’ perceptions of how the job is getting done, and who is being rewarded.
To be honest, the latest findings are not a surprise, considering the miserly upward creep of pay hikes for most workers amid times of plenty for most corporations.
What strikes us about the survey, however, is that Illinois companies showed up worse in many categories than did companies elsewhere.
For example, Illinois workers were less likely to understand their firms’ goals, less likely to feel they receive a fair deal on their job performance evaluations, and less likely to think their jobmates are working as a team.
Why do the Illinois firms fall behind in
these categories? It is probably the mix of companies in the state, suggests Ilene Gochman,
a psychologist for Towers Perrin based in Chicago. She heads the firm’s organizational research.
“Illinois employers need to go back (to their workers) and explain their business purposes.”
Organized security: They are very young or very old. More often they are black, Latino, Asian, or recently arrived immigrants. They put in long hours, often without a day off.
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Over the last few years, a flood of workers looking for these jobs has even led some firms to lower the wages. These workers carry a heap of responsibility on their shoulders, but their training is usually minimal.
They are security guards, the guy who buzzed you in at the front desk, the woman who watched you pull out of the parking lot this morning, the fellow in the office hall who always says good night.
Are these the building blocks for newly resurgent organized labor?
Long accustomed to organizing low-income workers in similar conditions, the Service Employees International Union and its Local 73 in Chicago is trying to organize security guards.
It already has 6,000 such workers, making it the nation’s single largest local among unions that represent different groups of workers.
“Our whole idea is to obtain a critical mass, so we can drive up wages and benefits for the whole industry in the Chicago area,” says Phil Martini, head of organizing for the local’s security division.
So far, the local has half of the security guards in the Chicago area, according to Martini, and it now hopes to organize armed guards, who are largely unorganized locally.
But some unions face a legal problem organizing these workers.
Organizing security guards is even more difficult for large unions because of federal labor laws that say employers are not compelled to bargain with unions that represent other workers.
But Martini vows to fight the good fight. “We are pretty tenacious,” he says.
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Stephen Franklin can be reached at [email protected]
MORE ON THE INTERNET: Find out what’s happening inside Chicago’s business sectors at chicago.tribune.com/go/insider