Lifetime Job Insecurity
Tenure for teachers is not all FakeGates is referring to when he talks about your tough boss who doesn’t have it. As it is used here, he is referring to the economic engine: that insecure pool of workers who at every level is afraid that their livelihood could be lost at any moment. When your boss has reason to feel that he could be removed for arbitrary or economic reasons, if he is insecure in his ability to continue to provide for himself and his family, he will be willing to get you to use all of your resources to help him feel secure. How willing will you be in order to feel secure yourself? In this regard, insecurity is a tool for producing without concern for the diminished quality of life that it institutionalizes.
According to Noam Chomsky, The whole economy [has] changed in significant ways to concentrate power, to undermine workers’ rights and freedom. In fact the economist who chaired the Federal Reserve around the Clinton years, Alan Greenspan … testified proudly before Congress that the basis for the great economy that he was running was what he called “growing worker insecurity.” If workers are more insecure, they won’t do things, like asking for better wages and better benefits. And that’s healthy for the economy from a certain point of view. In whose interests is it for workers not to ask for better wages or benefits, reasonable working hours and family time? In whose interests is it that work be defined as a food chain of insecurity in which nothing matters but that we keep our spot through sacrifice of all we have in family, health and happiness in order to help the insecure human above us who has sacrificed all that he has? Is this a sustainable way to work and live? What does it mean for families and children? Should we be teaching our children that we are preparing them to enter a world in which they will be asked to give all to the purposes of their employment, that if they are among the lucky, they will work without ceasing, their children will be raised by others or will be required to raise themselves; they will have an approximate health care that will limit their access to life saving tools and tests. They will have leaders who sell them alternatively the language of justice or the language of personal responsibility, but whose actions will buy them more burden at every important juncture.
We should teach our children tenacity and grit; they should know that there is work ahead. Some of that work is in skills and competencies, but some of it will clearly include that work which is the privilege and the task of every generation: to revitalize, protect and secure the fruits of liberty and justice for all members, to assess what is being asked of them by their society, their employers, their government. They will need to learn how to think and to measure these asks against the vision they have for themselves, their families and humankind. And it may be that they will need to fight for and demand a society that supports sustainable work and a balance between work and family life. They can expect to fight for those rights for others who are less able to fight for themselves. And, it is almost certain that they will need to protect government from being neutered in its essential task of protecting the common good.