With much of the opinion-making world fretting that American executives may no longer be compensated at their customary levels of obscenity, and fearing an exodus of the kind of top-notch managerial talent that brought the US economy to the brink last year, it may seem perverse, or at the very least unsporting, to dwell on the lot of the garden-variety shitcanned American worker. And it's undeniably true that joblessness is a subject that much preoccupies me these days. Still, as the official rate of unemployment continues inching toward 10 percent-and the real jobless rate having long ago left that benchmark in the dust-even investor-smitten outlets such as Bloomberg News are forced to concede that unemployment is now a chronic drag on an economic recovery that's been largely predicated on bank bailouts.

But the news on the jobless front isn't uniformly grim, reports Business Week's Michelle Conlin. A recent study of the impact of mass layoffs at the home plants of the airplane manufacturing giant Boeing turned up some unexpected findings.

The 3,500 laid off Boeing veterans who participated in the longitudinal study by a team of researchers at the University of Puget Sound were much happier than the employees still marooned in the Boeing workforce, which shed fully a third of company jobs-going from 234,850 to 157,441 between 1997 and 2006. One industrial psychologist who co-authored the forthcoming 2010 book (called, of course, Turbulence) summarizing the results told Conlin that "over and over... average depression scores were nearly twice as great for those who stayed with Boeing vs. those who left. The laid-off workers were less likely to binge drink, often slept better, and had fewer chronic health problems."

One obvious reason for the disparity, Conlin notes, is that surviving an early bout of layoffs is no guarantee of anything like longer-term job security. So in its gruesome job-devouring guise, the Boeing workplace soon came to resemble nothing so much as a West Coast touring production of Glengarry Glen Ross: "With each round of layoffs, the survivors hustled to reinvent themselves. They re-proved, re-auditioned, and re-positioned, only to watch another manager-pushing the fad du jour-parade through the door. Employees who had once seen themselves in every plane passing overhead were now trading in gallows humor. As in, 'Dead worker walking.'"

Nor did the managers wielding the axe immediately repair to a nearby meadow to fling their enhanced stock compensation packages joyfully in the air; they succumbed to what industrial researchers-themselves no mean hands at gallows humor-call "executioner's lament." Managers grew "emotionally numb and disengaged." Even more so than usual, that is.

By contrast, many of the laid-off Boeing informants in the study moved on to new jobs, "even if they didn't always pay as well"-a fairly common condition, alas, when mass layoffs flood the job market with workers ill-suited to fill vacancies requiring specific skill sets. Still, even with reduced paydays, the cashiered Boeing workers "felt as though they had escaped a bad marriage," the research team discovered, much to its surprise. As one such gay divorcee cogently put it, "You feel better when someone takes their foot off your neck."

Now, it's true that the airplane-making business brings up the rear in today's way-new digital-cum-service economy, so the Boeing casualties may have felt some enhanced relief simply by virtue of escaping the nation's incredible shrinking manufacturing sector. And the plight of today's reserve post-industrial army of workers encompasses a far stranger spectrum of possible career outcomes, as Jennifer 8 Lee reported inadvertently in a New York Times dispatch on opposite-side parking in Manhattan, which featured the exploits of Tom Karlo, proprietor of the blog IsAlternateSideParkingInEffect.com, "a former Lehman Brothers investment banker who is now a manager for the Internet Movie Database." Nevertheless, even in the best of times, the contemporary workplace is a dark satanic mill producing a rich array of psychic maladies, from depression to suicide.

Small wonder that when confronted with the prospect of job cutbacks-which most workers delusionally believe will happen only to others, not themselves-employees are most reluctant to give up salary or vacation time, the two meager outside compensations for the daily Goyaesque torment known as job-holding. After all, vacations physically eject you from the workplace, while higher salaries leave you with a more comfortable margin of disposable income to spend on the controlled substance most likely to get you through your workday. Together, they form the office drone's optimal regimen of spiritual hygiene-short of getting laid off, that is.