Redundant, left out in the cold

You can lose so much following catastrophic job loss. Sleep. Strength. Dreams. Opportunities. Friendships with colleagues. Picture: iStock

It’s a predicament I’m seeing increasingly. A cold, cold place. My letter writer would prefer to remain anonymous. Let’s just say she’s a woman of a certain age. “Dear Nikki… My senior position was made redundant eight weeks ago. Some 34 job applications later there is no employment offer despite an MBA, a Degree in Applied Economics, a Grad Dip in Strategic Management and a Grad Dip in Applied Corporate Governance, and being a Fellow of the AICD and Governance Institute of Australia.”

My letter writer cannot land a job, yet she is still of value to the community. She is caught in a new state of great uncertainty and stress and it’s affecting every aspect of her life. “I have been a single parent to my daughter since she was three months old, worked my entire adult life, put myself through uni and my daughter through private school, cared for my parents in their later years, bought and paid off my home.”

Redundancy is an awful hammer blow of a word. The very meaning – no longer needed, superfluous – implies uselessness. That’s traumatic, when a worker has so much more to give. George Orwell wrote about the horror of the job scrabble more than 80 years ago, and the emotional toll behind the word hasn’t changed: “I suppose there hasn’t been a single month since the war, in any trade you care to name, in which there weren’t more men than jobs. It’s brought a peculiar, ghastly feeling into life. It’s like on a sinking ship when there are 19 survivors and 14 lifebelts … the feeling that you’ve got to be everlastingly fighting and hustling, that you’ll never get anything unless you grab it from somebody else, that there’s always somebody after your job, that next month or the month after they’ll be reducing staff and it’s you that’ll get the bird …” That’s the gig economy in a nutshell.

There is dignity in work. Consistent, regular, stable work. There are very human, deeply painful stories behind every job loss; unseen, personal traumas all around us. Particularly during these uncertain, fearful Covid times. A salary is not merely a string of numbers. It is pride. Relief and joy and certainty. A lightness of being. You can lose so much following catastrophic job loss. Sleep. Strength. Dreams. Opportunities. Friendships with colleagues. Serenity. Productivity. Goals. Sanity. It is often the result of a business calculation. It is rarely painless.

My unemployed letter writer was responding to a column of mine a few weeks ago, noting the dignity and beauty in small gestures all around us. “Your piece prompted me to be grateful, Nikki, for my family, friends and what I have achieved … and continue my efforts to secure employment where I can add value and be valued. I am so grateful to five gorgeous girlfriends and to two equally outstanding male friends who have supported and encouraged me. Reading your piece resonated so genuinely that I spontaneously phoned each of the seven friends and shared the message/sentiment, and thanked them wholeheartedly for their support and encouragement over the past eight weeks.” She remains unemployed.

I wish my letter writer well, and wish her a job, soon. But it doesn’t always end up this way. I’m haunted by the suicide of a friend – a dear, lovely man made redundant from a job that was his passion. His identity. His world. The humiliation, financial stress and loss of control after losing his beloved job were unbearable. He cared so much about providing. About being that good, responsible father. He left behind a beautiful, bewildered young family. It reminds me that it is so often those addled by the desire to do good – to be good – who we lose to suicide. The best of us. They set such high standards for themselves.

Please be kind. You never know what battles another person is facing.