A contemporary business practice is known as downsizing, or the effort by a company to reduce the size of its workforce in order to increase profitability. Such a quest for profits is often seen as detrimental to the worker, creating a new sense of insecurity, reducing decades-old relationships between worker and management, and assuring corporate profits while undercutting the ability of workers to make a living. The corporate manager in such a situation has determined that his responsibility lies with the company and not with the community, at least in some ways, and he or she may even have a rationale as to why their effort benefits the community in some way. The issue is how Plato's Socrates would evaluate such a rationale, and Socrates would find that the manager has to reach deep inside to ascertain what is truly right and to do it in spite of corporate or community pressure to do otherwise (with "manager" meaning the high-level management that makes the decisions, not the mid-level manager who carries them out).
There is little doubt that the downsizing issue will remain a major one in American business into the near future, for companies are seeing that they have a competitive edge if they are leaner and are not merely responding to the recession. Firms claim that in the new international environment, cost control is essential and layoffs must continue even after the economy picks up. White collar employment, especially in the areas of planning, analysis, and research, is being eliminated to improve the profit picture. The two perils of white collar work are that its benefits are difficult to quantify and that long term thinking in the U.S. always loses to short term profit pressures. The outcome of all of this delayering and downsizing is, paradoxically, a move toward the relatively more flexible Japanese model of firms having a large percentage of temporary workers.
In the 1980s, corporations were primarily co...