For workers' attitudes, economic woes are gut punch

President Bush and other politicians have talked about how scandals like Enron and WorldCom have eroded confidence among investors, but the lasting erosion for the 21st century might involve something that the politicians are ignoring: workers' attitudes.

There's a saying in sports: Winning is a great deodorant. That shoving match a few weeks ago between Barry Bonds and Jeff Kent in the Giants' dugout has pretty much blown over, largely because the team played well afterward. But if Bonds or Kent had gone into a major slump and the team lost 10 games in a row, fans would have been clamoring for one of the stars to be traded.

Many workplaces these days feel like a 10-game losing streak. The economy is down, stress is up, and that light at the end of the tunnel might just be glare from all that sweat on Alan Greenspan's forehead.

History tells us that we won't be in this same losing streak five years from now, but I'm getting more afraid that the stench will linger in many workplaces long after the losing streak ends.

My father was in the generation that rebuilt the country after the Depression. Like many people his age, he worked hard and built a good life for himself, but he didn't have the same optimistic expectations that people in younger generations did. If he had a job that paid the bills, he accepted that,

because he had spent years seeing how ugly the economy could be.

I spent several weeks in Japan in 1986, and saw the same attitude among the people who had rebuilt that country after World War II. Like my father's generation, they could never savor their economic victory because there were always tinges of fear that something could go horribly wrong again.