The Snake Oil of “Secure” Jobs

There’s been a lot going on in the sociopolitical realm lately — at least in the United States of America (which happens to be the country I am most familiar with). Moreover, what with the U.S. being a global superpower and all, it’s hard to just outright ignore it, even if you’re not in the country and/or a part of its citizenry. You may or may not like what’s been happening of late, but I think you would be hardpressed to make a compelling case that things are not changing — and that they are not changing rather rapidly.

Times of sociopolitical upheaval (or even incipient upheaval) seem like maybe they’re not the best time to start longterm projects with uncertain outcomes — like trying to become a starving artist successful author —, especially when those uncertain outcomes have the potential to range from financial survival to financial suicide. Life dreams — some haters might call them pipe dreams (-.-) — tend to be inherently risky endeavours, after all.

So why am I doing this now? Why aren’t I being sensible by buckling down and securing a 9-5 Real Job™?

Because, in my estimation, those “secure 9-5† jobs” are not actually all that secure.

Job security in this context has become a thing of the past — if it was ever a thing to begin with and not just a thing we like to think existed in the mythical past we invent in our collective nostalgia. (There’s a term for this cognitive bias: rosy retrospection.)

Even allowing that this kind of job security might have been a thing in my parents’ generation, it certainly hasn’t been in mine. I’ve seen — or been part of — mass layoffs at almost every company I’ve worked at that had (at least to start) enough employees to lay off en masse. And no, it’s not just because I happened to choose inherently more insecure sectors or turnover-happy companies.

In the United States (which is where I have worked for most of my professional life), large swathes of occupations once thought to be secure, lifetime tenures have died out or been automated in the last few decades. And in the last few months, this process of “unsecuring” jobs has only accelerated. The U.S. government has been gutting its own workforce — where government jobs were once thought to be the securest jobs in the country.

I personally know several people who had the security of being in the same job (as a government worker or as a government contractor) for 10, 15, 20 years — and who have now been kicked to the proverbial curb through no fault of their own.

So, no, I’m not buying that “secure job” bullshit. That’s snake oil that’s been culturally peddled for literally decades now. Mass layoffs in the U.S. have been seen as a legitimate business tactic since 1981 — “thanks” to Reagan. Layoffs existed before then, but they were seen as last-resort measures, not a regular thing that companies could do whenever they pleased, which is what they have become.

Despite the prevalence of layoffs, recent and not-so-recent, people (particularly older people, in my experience) still cling to this myth of this sort of job security. Clearly, this same old shit is still being peddled.

Why the fuck would I want that?

Spoiler alert: I don’t.

Second spoiler alert: It’s not all shit. I do think there is a non–snake-oily kind of job security. Read on in Part II.

†Hell, a lot of them aren’t 9-5, either, considering how so many employers pressure their employees to be on call outside of their official working hours, expecting them to answer work calls, texts, and/or emails promptly, no matter where they are.