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The Myth of Corporate Security and the Changing American Workplace (Part 2 of 3)
Bob Weinstein is a journalist who covers technology, project management, the workplace and career development.
If downsized workers of 1980s corporations could have objectively evaluated the changing job market, they would have been better equipped to start over. They would have understood why they could no longer amble through their careers just doing their jobs. They were about to learn that survival depended upon learning how the whole engine worked. Suddenly, they had to see themselves as self-sufficient, mobile and capable of maneuvering in a tough world with new rules, very much like our predecessors did at the turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries.
Most were caught by surprise, however. As corporations aggressively cut staffs throughout the ‘80s, most workers found themselves floundering in an uncertain sea. Understandably, they were less than bullish about the future. Blinded by loss and fear, displaced employees couldn’t see beyond their pain; they couldn’t visualize better things ahead. They didn’t realize that they were standing at the foothills of a new age, unprepared for change. After being coddled and mothered by smothering corporations, they lacked basic coping skills. Many didn’t even have a resume, much less know the first thing about job hunting.
Gone are the TV sitcoms idealizing the job
Bewildered and confused, displaced employees couldn’t understand how their surrogate corporate parents could abandon them…
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"It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons." - Douglas Adams |