What happens at home when people can’t depend on stable work

by Allison J. Pugh, Apr 4, 2017

Recent research by economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton documents a dramatic rise in mortality rates among working-class white people in the U.S. The immediate causes of these “deaths of despair,” as the pair refer to them, are often factors like drug abuse, health problems like diabetes, and suicide. But these issues stem from a larger epidemic of job insecurity for Americans without a college degree, creating a sense of untethered hopelessness among millions of people. The problem is widespread enough that it led, in 2015, to the first overall decline in U.S. life expectancy since 1993.

The fact that people’s health and emotional well-being are so closely tied to the absence of steady work is striking. Yet what matters here is not just job insecurity; it’s also what we might call the culture of insecurity: the growing conventional wisdom that precarious employment is inevitable. Many Americans can narrate the decline of the social contract, the collapse of the kinds of jobs their grandfathers held for decades before retiring and getting the gold watch. Survey data reflects this sentiment as well: According to Pew, most Americans are convinced that jobs have become more precarious than they were 20–30 years ago, and predict that it will get worse.

These kinds of cultural proverbs, as they are repeated and shared among us, tell us which kinds of emotions are appropriate responses and which are not. If job insecurity is all that we can expect, for example, we learn that resistance is not just futile. It is akin to cursing the wind: misguided, blind to what everybody knows, even illegitimate.

So despair is not due just to a lack of work — it stems from insecurity’s emotional trap, which extends far beyond the workplace.

My research, involving men and women who experience varying levels of job insecurity, suggests that the dampening expectations they have for employer commitment requires them to moderate the kinds of feelings they allow themselves to have in the event of a layoff. This is especially true for less-educated workers, who are most likely to say they could lose their jobs in the next year.

Take the example of Gary*, a former construction manager I interviewed. Grieving after he lost his job, along with his crew and other managers at his company, he noted that “it was the biggest mistake I ever made.” His mistake? “Putting [his] livelihood and career into their hands” — that is, trusting the firm that hired him.

Gary’s inward focus is not uncommon. American workers often blame themselves for being let go and adopt emotional strategies that serve to suppress their own ire and outrage. Many resign themselves to being without work as just “the way things are today.” They tell themselves that getting fired is a new opportunity; they express empathy and understanding for the employer’s point of view; they remind themselves that they did not like or want the job anyway. While some workers are angry (and they are more likely to be angry when they perceive unfair treatment), negative feelings are often viewed as less culturally justifiable in an era when letting people go is, as one woman told me, “just what you would do.”

“And that’s okay, they’re there to make money,” Martha* said, even as she related a hair-raising account of being fired to make room for the boss’s lover. Said another person I interviewed, “It’s just what you would expect.”

Something troubling happens when people become resigned to this inevitability, beyond lost wages, routine, and a sense of purpose. In order to deal with the emotional fallout of being betrayed on the job, workers construct what we might consider a “moral wall” between work and home. At home, they brace themselves against the insecurity they largely accept in the workplace, striving to fend it off when it comes to family and friends. It’s as if people say, “We might not be able to rely on our employers, but surely, in our intimate lives, we can count on each other.”

Yet when they set unreasonably high expectations at home, it can lead to a certain brittleness, an inability to bend or handle inevitable ups and downs. Less-advantaged workers in particular are fervent about the sacredness of intimate relationships and the inviolable duty they command. When people close to them fail to live up to these standards, it can lead some to give full vent to the anger they do not allow themselves when it comes to employment.

In other words, when people have no way of addressing failed commitments at work, they double down on the importance of commitment in other parts of their lives. And when those commitments don’t meet their expectations, despair can grow.

Gary, for his part, has a live-in partner but has been married and divorced twice. “The hurt that’s been caused to me by a lack of commitment on the part of other people — marriage can be tossed out like a Pepsi can,” he said. Let down by others at work and home, it is only at home that Gary permits himself to feel betrayed, because when it comes to work, remember, he blames himself.

The bitter paradox, of course, is that job insecurity is not inevitable. Economists have shown that downsizing does not necessarily lead to higher productivity or shareholder value. Some researchers have suggested that in the coming automation revolution, machines could refine tasks without eliminating whole jobs. Change may be imminent, but its contours are hardly inevitable, depending instead on how we approach it. Denmark, the Netherlands, and other EU countries where union density is higher than in the U.S. have taken important steps, including worker retraining and more-generous unemployment compensation, to balance worker needs for stability and employer needs for flexibility. Dubbed “flexicurity,” these provisions were strained by the Great Recession but contributed to stronger economic performance by the Nordic countries. In fact, the working-class deaths of despair uncovered by Case and Deaton in the United States, a country that has uniquely embraced downsizing as a management tactic, have not been found in other rich nations.

Gary’s story, and those of others I spoke with, gives us clues to the causes of deaths of despair. Uncertainty about the availability of good, steady work is an emotional hit, one that both limits people’s capacity to respond on the job and amplifies their response at home.

So when we talk about work today, we have to talk about it in the context of an unrequited contract, our collective acquiescence to the notion that work can no longer be counted on. When people are left out in the cold by their employers, they steer their yearnings for commitment toward other arenas, such as their personal relationships with friends and family. Yet these yearnings often end up making their intimate lives more fraught, as high expectations meet human frailty. This can lead to even more sorrow and betrayal. Despair makes sense when all we’ve allowed people — and all they allow themselves — is the cultural acceptance of their own abandonment.