Job Security in an Uncertain World

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© June 16, 2014

Since the future is unknown and not directly knowable, while the present is a fleeting instant that cannot be fixed in order to make it serve as our guide, our future actions must be based on what is in the memory, not as isolated items, unchanging and unconnected, but as chains of past consequence whose trajectory can be projected into the future.  In that sense, we all drive forward by looking into our rearview mirror.

Garry Wills, Saint Augustine’s Memory (2002)

You want to be happy, to forget yourself, and yet the more you try to forget yourself, the more you remember the self you want to forget.  You want to escape pain, but the more you struggle to escape, the more you inflame the agony.  You are afraid and want to be brave, but the effort to be brave is fear trying to run away from itself.  You want peace of mind, but the attempt to pacify it is like trying to calm the waves with a flat-iron . . . We know that worrying is futile, but we go on doing it because calling it futile does not stop it.  We worry because we feel unsafe, and want to be safe.  What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking it is painful, and that when we imagine we have found it, we don’t like it . . . there is no safety or security.  One of the worst vicious circles is the problem of the alcoholic.  In very many cases he knows quite clearly that he is destroying himself, that for him, liquor is poison, that he actually hates being drunk, and even dislikes the taste of liquor.  And yet he drinks.  For, dislike it as he may, the experience of not drinking is worse.  It gives him the “horrors,” for he stands face to face with the unveiled, basic insecurity of the world.

Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety (1951)

Who is in charge?

We all know the nursery rhyme of Humpty Dumpty sitting on, and falling off the wall, “and all the kings horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpy together again.” 

Whether we will admit it or not, we are all broken, split apart in some fashion with our head separated from our body, while being driven by fear, and in the cage of memory.  The contemporary mind has been haunted by the feeling that in some mysterious way the one struggling for security is nearer to hell than heaven, that the mazes of self-deception, and the subtle mockeries of hypocrisy hide behind masks and reality is lost altogether.  St. Augustine has something to say about this split-mindedness:

The past is not dead, it is not even past . . . we cannot properly say that the future or the past exists, or that there are three times, past, present, and future.  Perhaps we can say that there are three tenses, but that they are the present of the past, the present of the present, and the present of the future.  This would correspond, in some sense, with a triad I find in the soul and nowhere else, where the past is present to memory, the present is present to observation, and the future is present to anticipation. 

  No One Promises You a Living, No One Owes You a Job!

In an uncertain world, where job security is vital to our self-interests, we often do all the wrong things to put ourselves back together again.  Instead, we panic or become traumatized when made redundant, when our place of work closes, when the skills we have that once were in demand are no longer, when we are asked to take a 10, 20 or 30 percent cut in wages and benefits for the company’s survival, and are barely making it on our current income.  How could this happen when we’ve done nothing wrong?  Turns out we’ve done a lot wrong, starting with waiting for someone to rescue us from our predicament and ourselves.  

Author Alan W. Watts sees us in such circumstances consumed with the law of anxiety looks at nature backwards:

When we try to stay on the surface of the water, we sink; but when we try to sink we float; likewise, when we try desperately to save our job we lose it. 

Insecurity, he maintains, is the result of trying to be secure in a topsy-turvy world in which the normal order of things seems to be completely out of order.  Everything is the reverse of common sense turned inside out and upside down.  Suddenly, circumstances have forced us to be in charge of our lives and no one has prepared us for that ordeal, leastwise ourselves. 

We think we live in a time of unusual insecurity.  This is not the case at all.  In the past hundred years, or throughout the past twentieth century, long established traditions have broken down continuously: the traditional family, social life, government, economic order, religious beliefs, values, ethics, and most notable of all, morality. 

We have seen society stagger out of the Industrial Age only to be caught in a breathless dance in the Information Age, as manufacturing assembly lines have become a shadow of the former status.  This watershed moment of the early twentieth century was the backbone of the spirited working middle class, now replaced by quick minds and fingers on computer keyboards all but obliterating the blue-collar working class. 

There is no longer certainty.  Actually, certainty never existed, but it remained a myth perpetuated by a society deep in denial.  Institutions denied the reality by failing to pay attention, workers denied it by failing to learn new skills, and companies denied it by failing to press for change as the metamorphosis of the workforce went from blue-collar to college trained white collar.  Meanwhile, schools and universities continued to teach as if locked in 1945 nostalgia, even as private and public workplaces managed as if the color of the workers’ collars had not changed.   If blame is the game, there is more than enough to go around, but that doesn’t get us off the dime.

That said, for far too long the majority were willing to put up with lives largely doing jobs that were boring and inconsequential, content in earning the means to seek relief from the tedium with periodic respites of drinking and partying in expensive pleasure, or going on shopping sprees with reckless abandon.  Saving for a rainy day was not in the specs as the weather ahead was full of sunshine and promise with no dark clouds.  Neither workers nor employers were looking ahead.  It wasn’t anybody’s job!

We often refer to assembly line blue-collar working jobs as boring.  Nothing can compare to the boredom of managers and administrators who spend 50 to 75 percent of their working day in inconsequential meetings.  These meetings take away from meaningful work, and consistently have no purpose other than they are scheduled.  Meeting for meeting’s sake is a corporate disease that has been institutionalized to produce a report that few are likely to read. 

A survey of a monthly sales report went out to affiliates and manufacturing facilities in 13 countries involving some 14,000 employees.  When asked, first, if they were aware of the report, second, if they had read it, and third, if it was useful, most confessed they didn’t even know the report existed.  Yet, several people spent a good deal of time each month preparing it.  Further inquiries found that the report was redundant as all the information was accessible on a daily basis electronically to these same operations.  

Sad as this is, nothing is more egregious than performance appraisal meetings.  These are designed to bring managers and workers together to assess performance and create a developmental roadmap for workers to build on their assets and manage their liabilities.  Any organization has 15 percent hard chargers, who manage themselves, 70 percent followers who are management dependent, and 15 percent who are foot draggers, or essentially beyond salvation. 

In this one instance with which I am familiar, some 4,000 professional workers and 350 managers dedicated several hundred hours to the performance appraisal process.  Six workers were found to be declining in rating, and four were designated to need improvement.  All others received automatic merit increases. 

Given the normal bell curve breakdown of the working population, at least some 600, or 15 percent of the workforce should have been confronted with poor performance and treated accordingly. This cavalier disregard for the obvious is the endemic disease of the Culture of Comfort, which results in a company taking two steps backward for every step forward. It can ultimately derail a company and eventually lead to implosion in the process.

Performance appraisal did these workers no favors.  That was 2005 and the company is only a shadow of its former self today.  Hundreds of these workers, once well paid and comfortably employed in ostensibly lifetime employment jobs, are now out of work.  Unfortunate as this is, no company promises workers a living or owes workers a job. 

In an ideal world, these workers, engineers, administrators and managers would acknowledge this fact, and take charge of the situation.  Unfortunately, they had no incentive to do so.  Poor as they might perform they had job security and their income was not in jeopardy.  Incredibly, in many cases 20 percent of the workforce was doing 80 percent of the productive work, yet there were no protests from the contributors.  Nobody wants to make waves when the tsunami has not yet hit the shore.

Alas, we don’t live in an ideal world.  Workers have come to be dependent on the company to do for them what they should best do for themselves.  When the company fails, workers derive satisfaction accusing the company of failing in its function, unwilling to see their tacit complicity in the act.  It has always amazed me when a company is struggling and needs the full support and cooperation of its workers that they call in sick, or go on strike literally cutting off the hand that feeds them.

In the 1950s, after World War II, General Motors’ blue-collar workers earned as much as many practicing physicians in the medical field.  I was often a guest in their Detroit homes, and played baseball with their kids during my summer visits.  In many households, both parents worked for GM, Ford or Chrysler, and spent as much as they made.  It was evident in their fine brick homes with new automobiles in their driveways.  Their children expected to follow being employed by the “Big Three” automakers right out of high school with no break in the continuum. 

Then came the late 1960s.  The Rising Sun of Japan entered the auto market and cut deeply into these automakers’ customer base and profits, producing better, cheaper and smaller automobiles. 

Tom Brokaw hosted an NBC television program in 1980 with the program’s crying complaint, “Japan Can! Why Can’t We?”  Japan was using American technology that American manufacturers scoffed at as too costly and not necessary. What was the technology?  It was statistical quality control with production workers operating in decision-making teams, identifying and solving chronic process manufacturing problems. 

Detroit’s economic hemorrhaging forty years later has still not stopped despite using these new quality control tools.  The auto industry’s workers and managers continue to lock step to the mindset of 1945 when they held all the cards and could do nothing wrong.

Brett Farve, former NFL quarterback for the Green Bay Packer has it about right: “We get paid for practicing all week, playing on Sunday should be for free.”  Yet, one of the main complaints of professional athletes is the reverse of this: they hate practice, don’t think they need it, and believe they get paid for Sunday’s performance only.  Many workers in other professions display this same attitude.  They acquire a quality degree that speaks for itself.  They think, why do we have to take orders from someone “less qualified” than we are?  They don’t want a job; they want a position, and an automatic pass to a satisfying career.  After all, what other reason would we have for busting our butts in college for four, six or eight years?   The reality, of course, proves a little short of the mark.

  

A Case in Point!

Using The Fisher Paradigm © ™, I conducted a study of 1,000 engineers in a high tech company.  The demographic profile revealed staggering results.  Of the engineering population, 72 percent were over 35, 50 percent over 45, and 15 percent over 55.  Fully 60 percent were working on technology developed after they had left college.  Despite this technical gap they were doing little if anything to upgrade their skills. 

Complicating the picture further, it was evident that job performance decreased precipitously as job complexity increased for veteran engineers.  Yet, their salaries continued to increase.  At age 45, salaries for veterans peaked reaching a plateau with no noticeable decline for the balance of their careers.  This represented, in some cases, a $20,000 delta or differential with neophyte engineers, many whom had advanced engineering degrees with state-of-the-arts technical acumen.

Concomitantly, engineers ages 21 -- 39 represented a spiraling upward linear curve of increasing job performance and job complexity, but modest salaries compared to veterans.  In an environment dedicated to the gospel of “pay for performance,” they clearly weren’t.  What did they do about it?  They complained among themselves, or retreated into the “six silent killers” of passive behaviors? [3] In a word, they took no initiative or action to redress this issue.  They were being paid a dollar more an hour than they felt they could afford to rock the boat. 

The Fisher Paradigm©™ of Personality Profile provides evidence of their proclivity:

Engineers choose an engineering education because they have talent for and an interest in solving technical problems.

Research indicates that this gives engineers only 3 to 5 year window of competence before their technical talent is eroded if they are not exposed to a significant continuing education program.

The burden in the past has rested on engineers for continuing engineering education, which is another way of saying it is not likely to have been initiated.

Engineers who have become key contributors to long-term programs are often protected from more diverse experience and therefore suffer greatly when programs reach completion, or assume the next iteration in sophistication.  They are likely ill prepared to take on new engineering assignments.

Engineers, who cannot contribute meaningfully, may become anxious, frustrated, angry, hostile, passive, and eventually alienated from work and their associates, exhibiting the tendency to coast and drift into apathy.

Engineers, once realizing they can’t keep up, may also show initiative by going back to school, asking for specialized training, attempting to find on-the-job mentors, or by going to another company.  This is more the exception than the rule.

Confrontation, managing conflict, indeed, interpersonal relations are not high on the list of preferred activities of engineers.  The social content of the job is the least appealing to many engineers.

This assessment center process was able to convince management of a need, which resulted in a comprehensive continuing education program.  Management initially pledged $1 million for this program on the strength of The Fisher Paradigm Report.  The program has grown in sophistication to where technicians can now earn their engineering degrees in cooperation with the local university while attending engineering classes and laboratories at work.  Meanwhile, veteran engineers continue to upgrade their skills concurrent with new technology.  Once the seed was planted, engineers took control of the technical education program with a rotating engineering chair providing its continuity and enhancement.  This was accomplished with no interference from management.  Engineers now owned the program and the process. [4]

The New Reality

A job is a sacred trust between employee and employer.  It is a contract, a bond.  We have moved into a climate where workers must exercise more control over the process than ever before. 

Opportunities are limited only by the perception of their horizons.  If prudent, workers will make a representative assessment, or appraisal of where they are, what they are, and where they want to go, and what they need to get there. 

They will create their own career roadmap, not wait for management to create one for them.  Likewise, they will seek out mentors and exploit the opportunities available.  They won’t wait for opportunities to present themselves, but will create them by taking the initiative.  They will study their jobs as if they owned them, as indeed they do, and assume the role of leadership of their function.  They won’t waste energy or time campaigning for the next position at the expense of what they are being paid to do.  Nor will they spend countless hours chatting on the Internet or cell phones, texting or tweeting, entertaining themselves when they should be working.  They won’t bad mouth colleagues or the company because they consider their jobs boring, but instead will put effort in to bring new life into them.  They won’t look for fantasy jobs beyond their recognized limits.  Fantasy jobs are positions in which they have no stomach for the pain, frustration, commitment, sacrifice, or risks involved to realize the return.  Boring as the job might be, fantasy jobs require moving from knowers to learners, from tellers to listeners, from persons comfortable in knowing all the answers to students of the discipline.  

In this new reality, some see others less able prospering because they are less afraid to venture outside the box and embrace the unknown.  They are not only students of what they do, but find ways to complement the skills of associates so that they might be more successful.  They look for opportunities to make the company stronger without fanfare.  They are not on the make but on the making.  They are systemic thinkers consistent with Russell Ackoff observations:

If you take a system apart to identify its components, and then operate those components in such a way that every component behaves as well as it possible can, there is one thing of which you can be sure.  The system as a whole will not behave as well as it can.  Now that is counterintuitive to Machine Age thinking, but it is absolutely essential to system thinking.  The corollary to this is that if you have a system that is behaving as well as it can, none of its parts will be. [5]

If this describes you, and your approach to work, there is no reason to worry.  Should the company be forced to downsize or relocate, it would find a place for you; if not with that company certainly with another.  You are poised to look at opportunities in your industry because the misfortune of one is likely to lead to the good fortune of another. 

This new reality forces many companies to make hard choices.  Some workers critical of the company’s relocating plans refuse to admit they wouldn’t move under any circumstances.  They insist on the company providing security for them when the company is in a survival mode teetering on bankruptcy.  Not to worry, these workers expect to be treated from birth to death by the company, as surrogate parent to meet their economic and emotional requirements at any cost, reality be damned! 

This is not to make light of the fact that many lives have been disrupted if not destroyed by plant closings.  By the accident of their birth, workers today have come of age in a transitional and transforming period when the definition of work itself is in a state of change, when a place of employment is no longer an assumed fixed place, when brains are much more in demand than brawn, when the role of worker and manager are in flux, when working hard has been replaced by working smart, when a manufacturing based economy has been eclipsed by a service based economy, when information technology disrupts provincial stability with global fluidity. 

It was bound to happen.  It just happened during your working years.  Now, you must deal with it, or it will deal with you.

Much criticism has been directed at companies such as Wal-Mart and others who have forced their suppliers to manufacture their finished products in China and India.  The downside is that it takes away jobs in the United States.  The upside is that it produces cheap consumer goods that the less fortunate can purchase.  It is an old cliché, but the world is getting smaller and more interdependent.  In time, as the standard of living of third world countries improves, somewhere down the road equilibrium will be reached. Then cheap labor will not be the bargaining chip that it is today. 

That trend has started and is gaining momentum.  The dominance of the West is now being challenged by the emerging economic powers of the East.  That said the days of the fictive belief in the economic and political dominance of one nation over others seems to be in the twilight.  The combination of technology and population growth is forcing yet another reality on workers.  The onus is on them to be contract consultants and their own agents in a most competitive, but opportunistic marketplace, where it will be necessary to hone workers’ skills and match them to the demands of that marketplace.  Here is one story.

Not for Everyone!

When he was a boy, he discovered he was dyslexic.  School was difficult for him, and he had to work harder than most to earn average grades.  The problem wasn’t any less difficult in high school, as schoolwork remained a challenge.  He met it with every ounce of energy he could muster without complaint.  Some thought college was too high a hill for him to climb, but he persisted, and graduated with a B.S. degree in criminal justice from Michigan State University. 

His first job out of school was as a police officer in Tampa, Florida.  That soon appeared a dead end as he could see seniority controlled your destiny.  So, he went back to school at the University of South Florida, and earned an MS degree in criminal justice.  He continued to be a police officer, gradually separating himself from it to become an assistant professor in criminal justice for the university. 

As a professor, he met a number of rising legal minds in the community.  This spiked his interest in the law.  He took to studying law at night school.  Reading was always a challenge, now it was the main requirement as law school meant reading scores of books.  Undaunted, he persevered and graduated with a law degree, and promptly committed himself to taking the bar examination.  He studied so hard that he lost weight, but it paid off, as he passed it on his first try.

Everything changed.  He became a junior lawyer of a law firm in which much of the work was pro bono or handling cases others took a pass on.  By nature kind and generous, unassuming and even humble, he noticed that in his new work environment that there was a distinct pecking order, which included preferred billing hours, client exploitation, and amoral arrogance.  He remained stoic, as unhappy as he was, and refused to complain.  Instead, he studied diligently for his doctor’s in jurisprudence, which he again passed on his first try.  At this point, he changed law firms.

The new law firm was more of the same.  Only here the partners were treated like royalty, or as “crown princes or princesses.”  They talked about him behind his back because he didn’t spend the hours billing as they did.  What’s more, to their chagrin, he didn’t seem to feel guilty about it.  He couldn’t see billing clients excessively because you could, feeling this was as good as fraud.  So, he moved on again, this time opening his own law firm.

He invited more than one hundred lawyers and former clients and friends to celebrate the new opening but only a handful showed up.  It had to hurt, but he said nothing, going about his business working as hard as ever to make a go of it.  The firm prospered. 

Fortunately, years earlier, he had purchased five acres of prime real estate on Thonotosassa Lake, in Hillsborough County, Florida, which had a large house, and a smaller one on the property.  He moved into the larger one and rented out the smaller one. 

The economy changed and with it his law firm’s fortunes.  Business deteriorated and then things got so desperate that he had to split his property down the middle and sell half.  He also sold the little house on his side of the five-acre split.  This kept him solvent, but barely so.  Not dissuaded, he was still not through pushing the envelope. 

He decided to create an entertainment center in Ybor City, Tampa, Florida, a Cuban community of historic significance modeled after the French Quarters in New Orleans.  Never a timid spender on projects, he brought in a cadre of entertainers and investors from St. Louis.  They seemed interested until it was clear there were no guarantees.  He scuttled that project, and looked about for another.  None were on the horizon so instead he bought an office building, renovated it, and then rented a good share of it out to small businesses, while keeping his law practice afloat.

Some twenty years ago, he married a model and now has a family of two children, a boy and a girl, both are in college.  A family is what he always wanted, as his parents and brother had died, and only a sister was left.

It was during this period that he met a number of entrepreneurs who were restless for a project, but lacked the capital to seed it.  He had the capital.  Starting on a small scale, and paying his partners and his small staff out of his pocket, he operated the business like this for several months, nearly to the point of going broke again. 

Then, with his partners, he created a website and the business took off.  It grew every week.  More people were brought on staff.  Additional expertise was needed, so he sold part of his interest, bringing in another partner, still remaining the majority stockholder.  His generosity continued.  Operations were opened in other locations, and they took off as well.  But again, his generosity and over optimism came crashing down on him as the economy changed and so did regulations. 

       

During his affluent days, he designed an estate on his property of eye catching delight.  He had sold his little house, and now had to buy it back at twice what he paid for it, and did this without complaint or regret.  The new estate was in the Miami style with a two story white alabaster house with twenty foot windows overlooking the lake with a French stucco patio, an entertainment center, a gymnasium, and bar, a winding marble staircase, and floors a combination of marble and carpeting, large contemporary kitchen, ornate fireplace, and enough original artwork to fill a gallery, gated with a quarter mile landscaped serpentine driveway with fountains and dolphin sculptures snaking along the way, a tennis court and swimming pool, three car attached garage, and a separate four car garage for his automobile collection, which included an auto workshop.  He had a pier built on the lake with a cover boat hangar for his boat, and two wave runners, and other toys of a man with the disposable income to recapture his youth at age, fifty. 

He is now sixty three, and was set back again even prior to 2007 as were many others, and has never regained his momentum.  But his optimism has not faded neither has his fondness for taking risks nor looking for new opportunities.  He has opened a new business here in 2014, and with the same enthusiasm and élan that is part of his DNA. 

I suppose he could be described as a visualizing investment capitalist.  His estate is of his own design, and has aged as he has aged, and doesn’t match his optimistic perspective, but he remains undaunted. 

Contrast his bumpy ride through life with people who never metaphorically ever get out of bed.  He is a handsome powerfully built man, but never shows anger, a man more generous than anyone I have ever known, and a man who has frustrated me with that generosity, and with his picking of friends and business associates, people whom I don’t think deserve the time of day with him.

He is family man in the truest sense of the word, and has a beautiful wife and two adoring children.  But he frustrates them, too, because he is not into work as work is defined; is not into security as it is defined; and certainly is not into a logical, consistent, rational approach to making a living as some would expect from him. 

My sense is that he was burned out on work early in life, working at his father’s automobile dealership after school and of a Saturday for hours washing and polishing cars, leaving little time to play sports or just hang out with other friends. 

Parents can stimulate or kill our appetites for life in many different ways.  I suspect this was what killed his for work as we know work.  I’ve never heard him utter a negative word about his parents, or the ordeal I have just described.  It is not his nature. 

If you see him on the street, chances are he’ll be in a polyester warm-up suit, or an open polo shirt and stone-colored Timber Creek Wranglers and loafers or sandals.  I’ve seldom seen him in a coat and tie, although I know he wears them occasionally, but always looks uncomfortable.  He once belonged to a country club but didn’t play golf.  He was known to swim a hundred laps at the country club’s Olympic sized pool for warm-up to a workout with his body builder physique without the steroids. .   

One day a person said to me, “Why does he not work like the rest of us?  It’s not fair.”  I said nothing.  Whatever I might have said wouldn’t have made sense.  How do you explain someone who has overcome mountains of difficulty, and only creates new mountains of difficulty, seemingly in a never ending drive to what, I don’t know?  

Few of us have the courage or the appetite for such a life on the edge.  Most people want to play it safe and dream of winning the Lotto.  They don’t think of creating their own wealth, or heaven forbid, once earned, to put it into immediate jeopardy as has this man.

The irony, and paradox if you will, is the quest is, indeed, for money when money is not that important to him.  What he wanted, achieved, then lost more than once, was master of his own time.  I once advised him to invest when he was making money in the seven figures.  He looked me as if I was clueless as to his motivation.  Later, I thought about it and came up with this: he doesn’t invest because those who do constantly think of nothing but money, and he doesn’t want or plan to enter that cage.  I’ve watched him.  When he is broke, he doesn’t lose a step.  I believe this because I know him.  He’s my son-in-law.

The Wisdom of Insecurity

Alan W. Watts explains insecurity is a given, we best accept it.  Once we in fact do, he insists, we miraculously overcome it.  We are able to act and do, to be and take the initiative, to take control.  Insecurity, Watts discovered, is a mania for control of things we cannot control at the expense of the things we can, but don’t.  Control all starts with recognizing the only person, circumstance, situation, or predicament that we can change, if we but find the will, is ourselves.  No other.  None. Nada. 

Many of us are waiting.  We are waiting for the boss to change; to be promoted or demoted, retire, or die.  We think he or she is the problem.  Absent our nemesis, we think, our anxiety will vanish.  “He” or “she” is the problem.  It couldn’t be “me.”  We attempt to escape through pleasure only to find it kills what we love.  We delight in music, in its rhythm and flow, but should a note or cord be held beyond the flow, the rhythm is destroyed, and so our comfort.  But the discordant is part of the rhythm.  A tonality is life.

We want certainty when life is full of dissonant music.  Our anxiety is not new.  Read The Confession of St. Augustine (397 A.D.), the Bishop of Hippo, a man who straddled the fourth and fifth centuries, and you hear your own mind spinning as he says:

I am toppled back to earth, weighted with heavy burdens, plunged into compelled ways, netted, wailing strongly but strongly netted still.  So great is compulsion’s heavy baggage.  Here I can abide but do not wish to; there, I wish to abide but cannot – miserable either way. [6]

How many of us have been in this state of mind when our careers have gone awry; when an expected raise or promotion did not occur; when out of the blue made we were made redundant, when we thought our job was secure and were given a pink slip, when our world crashed and burned and we thought we had finally made it? 

Those experiencing the greatest difficulty adjusting to new circumstances live in the illusory world of false expectations, not the reality of the times.  This is most troubling for workers who live only to make money.  They are forever worrying about losing their jobs, and frequently do. Instead of earning a living, they are living an earning, and thus when the time comes to relax they are unable to do so.  They are likely to be bored and miserable when they retire, because all they know is work and making money.  They think nothing of returning to work and taking a position away from a younger person.  Their whole identity is work.  Their essence is tied to making money. 

The sad irony is that many of them have more money than they could ever spend the rest of their lives.  Money isn’t the point, they say, but they have made it so.  They are a machine that has no other function than to make money when they no longer need to make a living.  There is no one to master or to be mastered, no one to rule or to surrender to.  The purpose of life is what we do.  When what we value is only money, we are bound to live in misery when money no longer has a purpose.  Watts sees such people caught in their own honey:

It is as if we were divided into two parts.  On the one hand there is the conscious “I,” at once intrigued and baffled, the creature who is caught in the trap.  On the other hand there is “me,” and “me” is a part of nature, the wayward flesh with all its concurrently beautiful and frustrating limitations.  “I” fancies itself as a reasonable fellow, and is forever criticizing “me” for its perversity – for having passions, which get “I” into trouble, for being so easily subject to painful and irritating diseases, for having organs that wear out, and for having appetites, which can never be satisfied. [7]

The wisdom of insecurity is that truth, life, change, movement, and beauty are many names for the same thing.  The rhythm of life in all its uncertainty produces its own music and makes all things lovable.  Life and death, career and retirement, security and insecurity are all simply ways of looking at the same thing through different eyes.  We are at once all builders and destroyers, growing and dying, reaching high and low notes, all in the rhythm of life.  I could not write these words if I had not known pain and loneliness, love and wonder, failure and success, pride and humiliation, science and religion. 

It is difficult to realize job security when we compartmentalize work from life, and life from work; when we drive a wedge between the head and the heart, between thinking and feeling; when science, which covers the empirical realm of what is (fact) and why does it work this way (theory), is separated from religion, which questions the ultimate meaning and moral imperatives of why we are here; when pain and pleasure are on a collision course instead of being treated as normal fare. 

It may sound absurd but the highest pleasure is to be unconscious of one’s own existence, to be absorbed in interesting sights, sounds, places, and people, to be lost in life.  In that mindset, there are no thoughts of what’s in it for me, no concerns are others carrying their load, and no considerations am I getting credit for this? Incidentally, one of the greatest pains is to be self-conscious, to feel unabsorbed in the greater community or, indeed, the greater good.

If we are obsessed with security, traumatized with the possibility of losing our job, then we are back to Humpty Dumpty, suffering split-mindedness between “me” (self-demands) and “I” (role demands), between the job at hand, anxiety concerning it.  If I am afraid of losing my job, my efforts to feel and act bravely in the face of that possibility are moved by fear, for I am afraid of fear.  This is simply to say that my efforts to escape from my insecurity are moving me in a vicious circle compressing my perspective, shrinking my options, and giving me a blinding headache.  I know because I’ve been there.  Unless we break this cycle it can surely become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Creating Job Security in an Uncertain World

You can no longer expect to place your faith in a company.  Companies are struggling against the most competitive odds to stay afloat in a shrinking world.  You must awaken and take charge of your work, which is the only way to take charge of your life.  You can do this by creating your job security by taking small steps.  These are some that might be considered:

Embrace the reality of your situation.  It no longer is enough to do your job, to put in your time and let management worry about the health of the company.  You are the company!  Without you, there is no company.  Managers and workers are the arms and legs, brains and backbone of the same body.  Nothing of sustaining value happens unless this body works together and moves in the same direction.  There is no point in complaining.  Ask yourself: why am I frustrated?  What can I do about it?  Needy people need not apply.

Pay attention to what is going on beyond the rhetoric and rah rah!  Long before a company is in crisis, there are indicators that something is awry.  New competitors are on the horizon, orders fall off, quotas aren’t met, and schedules are late.  It suddenly gets very quiet.  Some of the hard chargers resign.  The rumor mill goes into high gear.  Workers who pay attention know when the workplace culture gets a cold.  It is not enough to generate feedback, but to take personal action.  You don’t wait for management to resurrect a survival strategy, or for the workplace to develop pneumonia.  You create innovations in your own function.  Once this momentum starts, on a personal level, it flows out in concentric rings touching all operations, and then miracles do sometimes occur.  But it starts with attention and proceeds directly to action on a personal basis.

Organize your work and work your organization.  Transparency is in as the vertical organization collapses into horizontal teams, where managers and workers are on the same page.  Transparency is also in as the boundaries between disciplines blur and specialists promote user-friendly tools for all.  At the same time, and this is new, workers and managers have more discretionary control of what they do than ever before.  The problem is not that this power suddenly exists.  The problem is that it has always been there, but no one has taken advantage of this fact, first by using it, and second, by using it effectively.  Functions and disciplines have complementary relationships, but to benefit them requires creative initiative.  Put another way, it means asking for help when it is required.

Promote the mature adult in your personality and take action.  The purpose of a company is what it does.  The function of your job is what you do.  The company’s mission and your function must be clear, understood and mutually supportive.  If they are not, it is your responsibility to make your case politely and as often as necessary, instead of infrequently and violently.  The company is a human group made up of conflicting, contradictory and sometimes colliding issues, all of which can be resolved with mature adult dialogue.  Managed conflict is actually the glue that holds the company to its task, not harmony.  A company that works hard to create the myth of harmony is a company in trouble.  Confusion is bound to occur periodically; failure is parent to success; and sustained success is endemic to a Culture of Contribution where problems are never denied but worked out. [8]

Shakespeare has Macbeth saying:  And you all know, security is mortals’ chiefest enemy.  It continues to be, but need not, especially in work if we recognize the wisdom of insecurity, and embrace its possibilities.  All problems contain their own solution, and the highest happiness is found in our awareness that impermanence and insecurity are inescapable and inseparable from life and work. 

There is a new movement afoot.  Maturity is gripping the workforce despite all the uncertainties of the times, perhaps because of them.  Workers are remaining resolutely committed to the job, rolling with the punches.  These workers, which are only a small contingent, are massing to become a large army as they show the way to going from being taken care of, to taking charge, leaving their cages behind.

*     *     *

Notes

[1] Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge, TATE Publishing, 2014, Chapter 9, The Culture of Contribution.

[2]Ibid, Chapter 5, Echoing Footsteps.

[3] Ibid, Chapter 6, Six Silent Killers: The Mad Monarchs of the Madhouse

[4] James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., “Combating Technical Obsolescence: The Genesis of a Technical Education Program.”  Presented at the World Conference of Continuing Engineering Education in Orlando, Florida, May, 7. 1986.

[5] Russell L. Ackoff and Fred E. Emery, On Purposeful Systems, Intersystem Publications, Seaside, California, 1972, p.1.

[6] Garry Wills, Saint Augustine’s Memory, Viking, 2002, pp. 7-8.

[7] Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity, Vintage Books, 1951, p. 39.

[8] Op. Cit., Dr. Fisher, Culture of Contribution