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I have worked for myself ever since the financial services firm I worked for in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s went belly-up as a result of a corporate scandal. It was the sort of scandal that affected everybody in the company, and even if all you did was sweep the floors and take out the trash, your career was tarnished, and there was a major “guilt by association” factor going on after the fall. The few job interviews I did manage to land were with those who were less interested in me, and more interested in just picking my brain about what had happened out of morbid curiosity. When one is compelled to begin a job interview with the phrase, “I am not a crook,” you know it’s not going to end well.
Since that time, I have been a professional writer, editor, and independent public relations counsel, and I haven’t looked back. I still get up at 6:30 every morning, have coffee, and get dressed. Even though I could work in my pajamas if I wanted to, I just can’t get motivated if I’m sitting at my desk in a bathrobe. I guess it’s just a holdover from my suit-and-tie days, but it works for me. I put in an eight-hour day, put on a tie if I have a videoconference, and go out for a long lunch and a Bombay and Noilly Prat martini, shaken and not stirred and with blue cheese stuffed olives, with old friends every Friday.
In my hometown, thousands of men came home from the war and went straight to the Studebaker factory, under the illusion that they would have a job for as long as they wanted to keep it, and a pension when they were ready to retire.
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Over the years I have come to realize that the ideal of a “secure job” is a myth, and it always has been. In my hometown, thousands of men came home from the war and went straight to the Studebaker factory, under the illusion that they would have a job for as long as they wanted to keep it, and a pension when they were ready to retire. They were good, blue-collar jobs you could support a family with and you didn’t need an education for it. The Studebaker plant was a benevolent parent for a brief time, but at the end, it didn’t end very well for anybody, the company went bankrupt and the pensions disappeared.
My father was a bit luckier, after the war, he had a choice of factory work at Studebaker and Bendix, he flipped a coin and took Bendix, kept the job until he retired and had a pension for the rest of his life. Today of course, Bendix is no longer Bendix, it’s mostly in South America and the local factory is half-empty, but he just happened to work there at precisely the right time.
There are two responses to this reality: We can complain about the evil corporations and about how they take advantage of us and permanently settle into an “us versus them” mentality. We try to impose well-intentioned but unsustainable rules on global companies, and although it feels good to do so, that adversarial approach isn’t always practical, and still preserves the dependency workers have on the corporation. The other response is to take matters into our own hands and create our own employment destiny. These days, more people are opting for the latter.
When I finished high school I worked at Bendix for a year, and constantly heard advice from my father, from other family members, from people in the company and from other well-meaning know-it-alls: “Don’t be a job-hopper!” they said. Conventional wisdom of the time was that you should never have more than two or three jobs in your lifetime. That was poor advice then, and it’s even worse advice now.
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The whole idea of job security is to see the corporation in a paternalistic role, with workers being inherently subservient and the corporation taking on the role of benevolent father figure to whom you must remain loyal for life. We fell into this trap for decades simply because it’s the easy way out in the short term, but it creates a dependency that doesn’t need to exist.
Younger generations today no longer labor under the misconceived notion of job security and loyalty. Is it necessary to be loyal to a corporation? The corporation is not a person, is not deserving of loyalty, and will give none in return. It is an entity which exists to create profit for its shareholders. It serves that purpose first and foremost, and it’s neither good nor bad, it just is. Individual workers take benefit from the corporation in the form of jobs, but there is no realistic reason for those workers to have any sense of loyalty to that entity beyond putting in the required work necessary to earn a paycheck, and giving two weeks’ notice before hopping to another job. You can’t be loyal to a corporation any more than you can be loyal to a kitchen appliance. You use it for as long as it suits your purpose.
Realizing this, that younger generation is taking a more active role in their own careers, freely hopping jobs when they need to in order to advance, and moving towards more self-directed careers in freelancing and the gig economy. We now realize that companies sometimes do succumb to competition, go bankrupt, or fall victim to financial scandals. When you set yourself up to be dependent on a single company, you set yourself up for failure – and when those scandals and bankruptcies do occur, you’re left out in the cold. When we think of ourselves as our own employers (even if we are working for a company), the end result is always going to be better, and we will have greater control over our own career destinies.
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This post has been republished to Medium.
Photo credit: iStock
Well, Mr. Blacharski, guys like Trump and the Koch brothers have been with their companies for years so I don’t know why the rest of us can’t be with a single company? Then again, many workers would like to move to other companies or want to start their own business but can’t because the system is rigged against them by the CEOs. The CEOs in the Silicon Valley made an unwritten agreement not to poach each other’s workforce in order to keep wages down. You also had people like Bill Gates crushing up start companies because they don’t want the… Read more »