Have you ever lost your job or worried about being retrenched? How did you handle it? How did you keep going?
For some, the loss of a job is too much, as it was for the Cell C employee who committed suicide because he had heard he was about to lose his job. My heart goes out to him and his family, because I have an inkling of how he must have felt. The past three and a half years have brought home to me just how central a job has been to my identity, and how the prospect of losing it can eat away at your self worth until there is almost nothing left.
I was made redundant in Sydney in late 2008, as the global credit crunch manure was about to hit the Australian fan (“made redundant”. Don’t you love that? As if your entire existence has become extraneous.). Later, in South Africa, I spent all of 2010 and the earlier part of 2011 convinced the axe was about to fall.
In some ways, the redundancy was much easier to handle. It was at least clear cut: one day you have a job, the next day the FD calls you into his office and you don’t. Unemployment was terrible, to be sure, because all that structure your day used to have falls away. You no longer wear the corporate battle gear, you no longer board the Mosman ferry to Circular Quay every morning and back at night. You sit in your rented apartment overlooking the harbour and feel utterly, utterly useless.
But having a job and constantly worrying you’re going to lose it can be as awful. It’s when you start to hear whispers that all is not well, when the CEO’s PA keeps giving you sympathetic looks, when you accidentally see revealing organograms, that all those little things add up and the paranoia begins to settle in to the core of your being. Little by little, you give over to the fear, and eventually your entire life revolves around the invisible axe hovering above your head, the one that could fall at any moment.
It’s amazing how a toxic workplace can turn you into something resembling a jumpy Vietnam vet, seeing the looming apocalypse in every memo, reading Byzantine conspiracies into every skinner session on the smokers’ balcony. Office politics is a brutal game, and not everyone is good at playing it.
It wouldn’t matter so much if work was simply a source of income. But it’s also something in which we invest much of our identity, and that’s where much of the trouble lies. Whether or not we are favoured by the corporate animals higher up the food chain comes to determine whether we can love and respect ourselves. Work soon breaches the boundaries we try to set between the office and home, and annexes large territories of our souls.
Though we talk about the importance of friends and family, it is our jobs that determine our place in the world, and work which establishes whether we are the ones who issue the orders or meekly carry out the bidding of bosses. (Few experiences are stranger than encountering a former manager in the local supermarket, when they no longer have power over you and you no longer have to suck up to them.)
I am fortunate enough to be able to walk away from wage slavery, at least for now. I have low overheads, my car is sponsored, and I have the freedom to do the kind of work that I want, whether it’s kicking off an art career, writing novels or coming up with strategies for interesting social media projects. Most people don’t have that option; if I had dependents, I’d still be hunched over my laptop filling in time sheets.
To all of you who have lost your jobs, or are about to, or remain stuck in corporate hell, none of what I have written will serve as any real consolation. There’s no George Clooney to tell you that being “let go” will give you a chance to pursue your dreams. The trick, I suppose, is not to let work define you to the degree that the loss of a job is the end.
Because really, it isn’t.
Your article is factually incorrect!
Cell C has said that it sent out a general communication to all staff on Friday, 25 May via email advising staff that it was about to embark on a retrenchment process, followed by an SMS alerting all staff to read the email.
“Affected employees were issued with formal notifications on Tuesday, 29 May inviting them to consult about possible retrenchment and alternatives to avoid or minimise job losses,”Cell C said.
The mobile operator said that the employee who tragically passed away on Tuesday was not at work on Monday or Tuesday and was not given any notification of possible retrenchment.
Nice article, thanks Sarah.
I was retrenched in 2009, a week before my first bond payment.
At the time my heart was in my throat, but luckily it turned into a blessing as I found a job just as my payout ended, and really enjoying it.
At present my new company is under a restructure excercise, so understandibly most people are on edge. Having been there before, luckily I know that should I get bad news its definitely not the worst news in the world. I am thankful that I am stronger through that experience.
Other than freelance contracts which are usually of a few months’ duration, I’ve lost jobs twice. The one was at a company where I’d started at the bottom and worked my way up to the top of my field; I’d been there 28 years. It was the culmination of a political assassination by the government, and we were all thrown out. It made me very angry, but in fact there was a huge sense of liberation. The second time was the end result of a wicked shanghai by a senile paranoid employer and a crooked (and incompetent) labour lawyer. Different anger. Different liberation. As I move into “retirement age” territory, my age, combined with my skin colour, turn my 40+ years of experience and wisdom into a shrinking asset. My freelance status, and therefore my unpredictable working life, make me fear the day – which I won’t know about until later, of course – when I get my very last job offer. The phone WILL stop ringing. And yet I have so much that I COULD give…
Sarah, I very much agree with your sentiment in terms of having to strive for and retain a certain type of attitude when faced with a situation of the nature. Having gone through same situation recently I must admit to also having had a sense of liberation rather than sadness and desperation and this, despite being thoroughly screwed by the company I worked for, for close on 20 years, without so much as a sensible reason. Naturally, a lot of factors determine how one reacts to retrenchment and these differ from person to person and from time to time. A critical aspect for everyone faced with the situation is believing that a loss of a job is not the end of the world. It does mean you are off your comfort zone, you are more vulnerable financial and indeed there could be serious setbacks in various aspects of one’s life standard and quality yet, it is not the end of the world!
Its truly terrifying to lose one’s job in South Africa, as we have no social security safety net. In places such as Australia theres the dole and State assistance with retraining if required to take up a different career. Here the only solution is to foster a mob of homeless children for the R750pppm social payout (R500 more than natural children)
In my town a morbidly obese man was laid off his job as plumber and decided to start a busines to business sandwich and snack operation – using a reconfigured supermarket trolly. Not only is he supporting himself, hes lost 30kg and is healthier than he ever was.
Ther’s some truth in that hatchet man’s favourite unctious words that “as one door closes, another opens” .
I’ve also been retrenched twice, both times due to financial difficulties in the companies I was with. This first time, I had a pre-school child to support and a reasonable amount of debt.
Nothing on earth changes the personality as much as finding out that, despite the skills and experience you have garnered, the market values nothing you represent. In umpteen interviews I was labelled ‘overqualified’; I tried developing new skills, sinking money I could ill afford into courses. I also eventually talked my way into a basic + com job I hated but taught me so much!
I learnt new respect for those who sit alongside pavements waiting for the miracle of someone who wants their brute strength and sometimes minimal skills for even a day. Those people are nowhere near who they could be and this is the greatest damage that our high unemployment rate does to SA.
When a builder working for me a few years ago brought two Zimbabwe chaps along to help out when his usual workers didn’t show up, the truth was enforced. The short-order cook and science master did three times the work of their two permanently employed colleagues. But what was most obvious, was that sheer hard labour gave both men a stature and dignity that was quite remarkable.
Earning R100/day is a lot better than earning nothing. I know from experience.
Good writing, Sarah. Very Alain de Botton.
Thanks Sarah for bringing this up after all this “spear” stuff. Yes, I have been retrenched (US company left SA) , fired (made a serious accounting mistake) and lost jobs otherwise. I survived the last twent five years as independent consultant making good but irregular money. A job makes you part of the furniture.
Was asked to do some “consulting” to street children (14-18 age group).
Q1: :what do you want to be?” – answers varying from “rich to stinking rich”.
Q2: How do you get there? ——-silence, mumbles….My comment: “then you won’t”
My advice: …..Look around and you wil see that there is enough work to do, offer your services, do the work well and you will get more work and more work untill it feels like you have a job.
The current labour brokers discussion falls in this category.
As someone who only got his first permanent job at age 65 [ without a retirement clause]… i can only say, that, after a lifetime ‘career’ of temporary and/or casual employment, during which almost every conceivable form of termination occurred, that the core requirement for survival [for those to who you refer in your blog] is to wake up each day in the knowledge that today is not only the possible last day of your life it is more probably day 1.
The hardest part of being a ‘freelance independent’ is getting paid for all the things you have to do to generate a crust so you have to make sure that you spread your risk, and that in itself can affect your overall performance. Humans do not like to pay for the labour of others and if the exploitation of hired labour is problematic, then the exploitation of the “freelancer” by all and sundry is no better.
An of course for someone who never worked permanently for anyone until he was 65 there are minimal pensions and so with that in mind i set out the principle of ‘basic pay’ as a core background theme in my podcast novel the jonker memorandum at my ‘personal pension fund ‘site… nicholasjakari.com Presently you can listen for free, while i build up the story to episode 60 en route to my destination and final ‘proof’ by episode 96 [give or take a few]… which i concluded while watching the world cup two years ago.
A new era needs a new idea.
Have a read of ‘Fat, Forty and Fired’.
I think these days being made redundant at least once in your career is almost inevitable.
Nice article , a seldom brought up subject. Having spent years and hundreds of thousand of rand on university tuition, only to hit the work place, at precisely the wrong moment. Having faced, retrenchment, unemployment for months, then a truly awful exploitative job, then just plain quitting. To working a job completely unrelated to anything I studies, in my terribly specialized degree. I feel like I’ve done it all, sat for months around the house sent out what feels like a million CV’s , tried to use other skills, all mostly in vain. One comes out will very little self esteem at the end, regardless of your qualification or skill, when there just isn’t work, there just isn’t. There are only so many times you can get out of bed and be positive before there just isn’t any positivity left.
Hi Sarah, I know you have pledged not to do so, but please get together another ‘art of the SA insult’ collaboration. I enjoy dipping into the first books (on the shelf next to my Zapiro collection) and just love the humour that makes us unique as a nation. The royalties from which will help protect you should you lose your job…