Betrayed by Work

Finally, Perry-Pastor -- her heart palpitating -- drove herself to the doctor, afraid that she was having a heart attack. Her doctor immediately prescribed an antidepressant and ordered her to take a medical leave. But Perry-Pastor was lured back to work three weeks later, when colleagues called, saying, "We need you. When are you going to get your butt off Prozac and come back?"

Shortly after her return, she realized that she'd made a mistake. "Nothing had changed," she says. She hasn't been back to work since January, but even after several months, the experience is still difficult for her to talk about.

"I've been through a lot in my life. My husband had been abusive to me, and then he ended up dying in a car crash," leaving her with two young children, now nine and four. "But that," she says, her eyes welling up with tears, "that was nothing compared to this."

The five other women in Philipson's office nod in agreement. Like Perry-Pastor, the mistreatment most of them have received is relatively mild, but they have had panic attacks, insomnia, chronic nightmares -- and even entertained thoughts of suicide. Months after leaving their jobs, many still can't go past their old offices without having flashbacks or hyperventilating. Philipson says that some of her patients are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, a severe psychological syndrome normally associated with war, rape, and other traumas in which there has been a threat of death.

After her bosses turned against her, Janel Schulenberg, 41, an administrative manager who had worked at an investment firm, became a virtual recluse for a year, locking herself in her room and fantasizing about killing herself in front of her employers. ("So, for the rest of their lives, they'd have to live with the pain they caused me," she says.) "People don't understand," Schulenberg says. "They say, 'Just get another job. What's the big deal?' But I loved my job. I didn't want any other job."

Today, most of the women in Philipson's office seem angry. They rail against their employers, who promised them a "family, but treated them like dirt," and they rail against themselves for not seeing through the sloganeering. Katherine Sanchez, 43, a former office manager at an elevator manufacturer, talks about how her employer would play Sister Sledge's "We Are Family" at corporate functions. She remembers how "jazzed" she was after attending one of the parent company's management meetings: "They had lots of plans for the company to grow."

A divorced mother of two teenage daughters, Sanchez considered herself part of her boss's extended family and looked forward to organizing the yearly office Christmas party -- until some of her office mates began bad-mouthing her, and she was stripped of her title. (She was never given a new title.) "We were a team, a family," she says, sarcastically. "Yeah, right." Now she runs her own secretarial- services and transcription business. "I'm orphaned, and that's okay with me," she says. "I hope I never work in corporate America again."

Many of these women had enjoyed success in their jobs and had become true believers in the system, going so far as to evangelize for their company -- despite signs that management was less than sincere about its rhetoric. While working at a large bank in California from 1985 to 1996, a 50-year-old African-American banker, for instance, had been promoted five times, finally working as vice president and manager of a branch that had nearly $200 million in deposits. While the bank was systematically laying off staffers, forcing the survivors to take on increasingly larger workloads, it played Patti LaBelle's "New Attitude" before meetings. "I bought into it -- hook, line, and sinker," the banker, who requested anonymity, says.

In the face of the layoffs, she tried to boost her 25-member staff's morale by hanging "We Are a Team" banners throughout the office and giving out T-shirts that read, "We are an American family." "I really did think of the people at work as part of my family," she recalls.

And so, when there was an opening to run a larger branch in a wealthier, predominantly white area, she was stunned when her boss of five years refused to consider her for the promotion. "You wouldn't fit in," he told her. After her boss chose his (white) golfing pal, whose job ratings, she knew, weren't as good as hers, and when her boss began nitpicking her performance, she decided to file an official complaint with the bank. She was devastated when none of the bank's top brass, including a "friend" in the human-resources department, supported her. "I thought that if I went through channels, we could resolve this amicably," says the banker, who subsequently sued, alleging discrimination. "I was hurt. They knew me. It felt personal. How could they do this to me?"