This morning in the FT, I read that white collar job security may be facing terminal decline:
UK faces white-collar crisis as pandemic ends decades of job security
]https://www.ft.com/content/596e49d9-1283-47b3-a771-1c0beebd7df5
Having graduated in 1998, this surprised me. In the last 22 years I've never become familiar with anything that might reasonably be termed white-collar job security.
My first job out of university was teaching English in Japan and I resigned from it voluntarily after 15 months, substantially because I wasn't happy about the remote region of Japan I was living in.
My next job, in London, was working as a German, French and Russian speaking newspaper reporter - which was more promising - but after 18 months there were massive staff cuts (not unrelated to aftershock of the dot-com-crash) and I was made redundant.
Since then, everything I've done:
starting my own business from home in London
mostly prioritising investing over spending
then, after the 2008 crash, leaving London for a less expensive city in the North
then, after another half-decade of Austerity, leaving that city for an even less expensive town in the North
... all of this has been prompted by my experience that there isn't any white-collar job security and hasn't been for a couple of decades now. Certainly the decade between 2010 and 2020 has been more insecure than any I've known.
I wonder if the piece in the FT was written by a boomer for a boomer readership and that it's the case that if an individual already had white collar job security at the start of the century, they've probably continued to enjoy it until now,..
... whereas if they were experiencing choppy waters back in 2000, those waters have never become noticeably calmer at any point in the last 20 years (and for many, arguably, they've been considerably rougher since 2008)?
Does anyone else regard the notion of white-collar job security as something of a myth?
Where do things go from here?
