A man we will call William* recalls the excruciatingly uncertain months before he finally lost his job. He had worked in the real estate sector until his work dried up. Little by little his responsibilities were taken away. His company was not doing well, that much was evident. It was letting employees go in small groups. If you didn’t get a tap on the shoulder on Friday, you were safe for the next week.
“We were just kind of sitting there staring at each other, waiting for the ax to fall,” William says. The waiting 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 the other employees that remained. “And then they’re just kind of wondering when it’s their turn.”
Although often heartbreaking, the moment a layoff comes is not always the most emotionally challenging part of the job loss. The months of uncertainty and nervous anticipation leading up to it take a heavy toll on an employee’s sense of well-being and mental health: A study of 63 countries found that suicide rates increased six months before rises in unemployment rates.
In the United States, where job uncertainty and insecurity are increasingly the norm, structural changes are imperative in order to take some of this pain off the individuals carrying this financial and emotional burden.
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I interviewed William, and dozens of men and women like him, from 2013 to 2016 while researching my book, Crunchtime: 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.
Despite 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 agreed that losing a job is a long, drawn-out process rife with the 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.”
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 United States forced participants in this study to try 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 can be 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 colour, in contrast, are not seen as having these responsibilities in the same way by decision-makers. Thus uncertainty, though ubiquitous, comes in various flavours 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 of their time at work.
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 both 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 United States have been stripped down. The older form of more secure pensions have largely been replaced by defined-contribution plans that offload the responsibility for saving and planning for retirement onto workers much more 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, policymakers 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 it. 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.
ALIYA HAMID RAO (Aliyah Amid Rao is an assistant professor in the department of methodology at the London School of Economics.)
