When You Know Layoffs Are Coming…
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Author:His Magnificence the Crown, Kabiesi Ebo Afin! Oloja Elejio Oba Olofin Pele Joshua Obasa De Medici Osangangan Broadaylight.
William*
recalls the excruciatingly uncertain months before he finally lost his
job. He had worked in the real estate sector, where his work dried up.
Piece by piece his responsibilities were taken away. His company was
not doing well, that much was evident. It was letting people go in small
batches. If you didn’t get tapped on a Friday, you were safe for the
next week.
“We
were just kind of sitting there staring at each other, waiting for the
axe to fall,” William says. And this waiting period was agonizing. “You
ever watch like a documentary with a herd of zebra and there’s a lion?
The lion catches one zebra and all the other zebras are a little way
off, just kind of watching.” William says that’s what it was like for
all the other employees. “And then they’re just kind of wondering when
it’s their turn.”
When
the moment of layoff comes, although often heartbreaking, it is not
always the most emotionally challenging part of the job loss. The months
of uncertainty and nervous anticipation leading up to it also take a
heavy toll on an employee’s wellbeing and mental health: A study of 63 countries found that suicide rates increased six months prior to rises in unemployment rates.
In
the U.S., where job uncertainty and insecurity are increasingly the
norm, structural changes are imperative for taking some of the pain off
individuals carrying this financial and emotional burden.
I interviewed William, and dozens of men and women like him, from 2013 to 2016 for the research that I conducted for my book, Crunch Time: How Married Couples Confront Unemployment.
I spoke with lawyers, financial analysts, communication professionals,
product managers, and public relations professionals — usually seen as
some of the most affluent and cushioned workers in the U.S. When they
have jobs, those jobs are well paid, often putting them in the top 10 to
15% of U.S. households in terms of income. And those jobs usually
include benefits such as healthcare and a 401(k) –unheard of for many
other workers, such as those in the gig economy.
In
spite of the apparent financial security and perks, though, these
professionals are not protected from layoffs, nor the acute anxiety that
precedes them. Over and over, participants in my research concurred
with William, attesting that losing a job is a long, drawn-out process
rife with torment that starts months before the job loss actually
occurs. A job, after all, can be taken away at any moment.
I
interviewed Anne, a therapist working in a large organization, who told
me that “as a salaried employee there’s sort of this illusion of
stability.” But this stability is ephemeral because, as Anne put it,
“Some guy just comes in and decides he doesn’t like me… And then all of a
sudden I’m not there anymore.”
My
participants recounted worrying for weeks, even months, that a job loss
was imminent. Rumors and whispers of imminent layoffs circulate in
company corridors as employees await the imminent announcement. Scott
worked for a global company that was acquired by an even larger one.
After the merger, in about the middle of the calendar year, he was
informed of the following: “We’ll let everybody know before the year is
out what your status will be.” He describes that “people were being let
go starting … March of this year, June of this year, September this
year, December this year and into [the next year] … The layoff cycle
that I was part of was almost two years long.”
The Uncertainty of Contemporary Employment
If
my participants could see a job loss was looming, why didn’t they just
spare themselves the pain of uncertainty and quit? Their reasons were
often practical, for instance, to hold onto health care or retirement
benefits. Anne had decided not to resign because she was pregnant and
wanted to retain her employer-based health insurance to receive the best
care she could. She also wanted to receive her (unpaid) maternity
leave. “I wanted to have another baby and so I didn’t want to leave,
because you need to work at an agency for a year before you have
protected FMLA [Family Medical Leave Act] status,” she says. “So I
really couldn’t leave at that point.”
The peculiar and unsupportive social policy
context of the U.S. forced participants in this study to hang onto jobs
that were fast slipping from their grip. This is the unfortunate price
workers pay for living in a risk society where the social contract is gossamer thin.
In
the economic fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic, women have had to face
more job uncertainty than men (with the strongest toll falling on women of color). But even in “normal” times, when making decisions about who ought to lose a job, managers prefer safeguarding the jobs of white, married men because they see these men as breadwinners
for their families whose income is necessary for their household. Women
of all races and men of color, in contrast, are not seen as having
these responsibilities in the same way by decision-makers. Thus
uncertainty, though ubiquitous, comes in various flavors and is
particularly acute for women.
No
matter who is experiencing the uncertainty, however, it comes with
grave psychological costs. In a last-ditch attempt to save their jobs,
soon-to-be-unemployed workers live the pre-layoff months in bursts of
frenetic energy: They meet with colleagues, network with departments
within their companies and hope that someone might be able to help them
keep their job. They spend more and more hours at work. They know the
improbability of surviving the upcoming layoff, but they continue hoping
for the best, straddling two worlds: bound to a company that doesn’t
quite want them anymore, but not fully in the world of the job-seeker.
The
adverse effects of insecurity can spill over to the home, as well. My
participants described thinking incessantly about their uncertain
employment futures. They were constantly on edge with their spouses and
children – their nerves frayed. Parker, a high school student in his
early teens, described that for him the toughest part wasn’t when his
mom lost her job, but the several months before. “She was worried about
losing her job and would get irritated really easily.” Parker adds, “We
had to be really careful around her in those days.”
Rethinking Policies for the Current Employment Landscape
First,
access to quality health care needs to be decoupled from employment.
This health care should be broad and comprehensive, also providing room
for paid parental leave,
to enable individuals to lead fulfilling lives in and out of work. In
the absence of this, people like Anne hold on to increasingly miserable
jobs with dire consequences for their mental well-being.
Second,
given the frequency of workers moving into and out of jobs and into and
out of employment, it no longer makes sense for financial security in
retirement (indeed, retirement itself) to be overly dependent on
employment. As it is, retirement benefits for those lucky enough to
receive them in the U.S. have been stripped down. The older form of more
secure pensions have largely been replaced by defined-contribution
plans (i.e. 401(k)s). These plans offload the responsibility
for saving and planning for retirement much more onto workers than was
the case in earlier decades. Stronger labor laws could help safeguard
worker’s financial futures by requiring more comprehensive retirement
contributions from employers than are currently the norm.
Finally,
while policy measures like temporary extensions of unemployment
insurance or increases in benefits are necessary in the short-term,
policy makers must pay attention to the fact that, as paid work is
currently organized, unemployment is a recurring reality for workers.
Given that, Universal Basic Income may provide an option that does not
tie the ability of workers to live, eat, and survive – nor their sense of moral worth
– to employment which simply does not provide this. Measures like these
will not fix the larger problems that lead to rampant job insecurity,
but they can start to relieve some of the pain endured by individuals
caught in this system.
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