My dad got his start in the family business - the same place his dad did.
By the time he was in his late teens they had several nice government contracts - all good payers, easy work… very comfortable… very secure. But a fledgling industry fired his imagination, and he soon began diverting the proceeds of his easy, regular work toward studying it. As it happened, he caught the bug at the start of a massive boom… a wave he would soon ride to great heights. Within a few years he launched his own business, watched it get destroyed by one incompetent government official, but… met my mother along the way, and started a new business with her. At the age where kids start to become aware of such things, the industry was in decline… and we could feel dad’s stress. Before long he couldn’t get any work, and soon after the industry suffered major turmoil that it took 10 years to recover from. He was reduced to taking menial jobs, ironically, in his first trade… long after the family business had ceased to exist.
A few years later I got my first “real” job ( the subject of my first novel… but I’m getting ahead of myself
), an apprenticeship that lasted four years. It was the most secure, stable job I’d ever had, but even then, we all knew there were no jobs for us at the end of our terms. For a few years I was able to ignore that fact, but the reality of unemployment came up all too fast. I took some time out, but soon decided I couldn’t sponge off mum and dad forever… and had better get a job. The first one was in sales, and it sucked majorly… but more interestingly, during the three tedious months I worked there, the company changed it’s name and owners three times. It was here I got my first taste of the permanent state of transience that has underpinned my working life.
Some would have labeled accepting two week’s work as a reason to toss in the sales job foolhardy, but I took it just the same. The two weeks became 6 months… but from that point on I waited, expected, to be told I would be out of a job within the week. A year on I found an odd comfort in this knowledge - almost as if I was daring it to happen, like a front line soldier painting a target on his helmet.
After 3 years study and a year of doing almost anything to pay the bills, I launched into a new career. I was initially employed on a causal basis, and to my knowledge had only 6 weeks work. A month later they asked me back again… but this time I’d stay for just over 4 years. I spent the first two and a half years of that job as a “disposable” employee… during which time I was knocked back by the bank for credit cards and loans repeatedly. I was earning 30% more than many of my contemporaries and had been for 18 months… but couldn’t get one dollar of credit.
They eventually made me full time, but only after I threatened to take a job with the competition. This was still no guarantee of security though, since the company was run by a Mr Burns like character who was ever so slightly eccentric. About once every three months, he would fly down from the company HQ Mittgong, turn up unannounced, and randomly start firing people. It actually got to the point where people hid in toilets, or out in their cars, lest Monty deem them surplus to requirements on a whim. As you can imagine, my resignation letter was scathing in its criticism of the corporate ethos, as I described 4 years of feeling like I had a gun held against my head. It didn’t matter how good or bad any of us were at our jobs… we could be given the flick, with no notice, any minute of any day.
You would think my next job, a nice cushy university position on the Government payroll, would seem like a cakewalk by comparison. But as the government embarked on a campaign of slashing funds to Universities nationwide ( the same government that in an election year is now throwing that same money back at them ), restructure and redundancy was on the agenda. People who’d had the same job at the same desk for 30 years were worried… how could they ever cope with the big wide world if the axe fell on their necks? For me though, it was just more of the same - just an extension of the ongoing uncertainty and instability I’d come to know so well.
I won’t go into the three years that followed, except to say the first six months were as fantastic and enjoyable as the ensuing two years were completely fucked and miserable ( and the subject of my first play… but I’m getting ahead of myself
). The first job I got after that black hole was a 3 month contract, and the money was pretty good - but the place where I did the work was in an utter state of turmoil. In the time I was there, I saw more than one third of the entire staff on the fifth floor turn over. It was as if we were being introduced to some bright new recruit every two days, and soon it became such a joke amongst the contractors that we couldn’t even be arsed remembering their names. We knew they’d be lucky to last a fortnight. Ironically, our jobs seemed far more secure than theirs - we had it in writing that we’d be payed for the three months regardless.
This changed the way I thought about job security, and really set me on the path I am now on.
So you might wonder why I sometimes seem stupidly busy, and at times, swamped with work. It’s not because I am a workaholic, or because I have a huge mortgage on a huge house to service, or crave loads of money to buy all the material possessions I need to give my life some sort of meaning. The motivation is a deep seated sense of dread that the rug may be pulled out from under me at any time. I am making hay while the sun shines. I don’t have two and a half businesses and three separate sources of income because I am greedy, or unsatisfied with my “station” in life. I do so because I fear that at any moment any one of them might cease to exist, and I will need to have a fallback. And if one of those fallback positions then collapses, I still have one left. This is how I live now… covering as many options as I can, and not putting my unconditional trust in any one single employer, business partner, or source.
On the one hand I feel cheated that I have never known any form of job security, and that situation was forced upon me by a generation that enjoyed “jobs for life” - but on the other, I feel lucky that I have learnt to be infinitely more adaptable and resourceful than many of that generation ever could. My dad was forced into an early retirement, not
in spite of having been highly specialised in two very different fields, but
because of it. He gave his time, knowledge, and expertise to people who largely didn’t appreciate or deserve it - only to have them cast him aside. He deserved better than that.
So I’ll remain a mercenary, a hired gun with the pistol in my hand instead of one held to my temple by someone else. It’s the only way I know.
