Mass layoffs are in fact a fairly recent phenomenon, emerging for the first time in the late 1970s. Job security was the norm in the US for much of the 20th century, and it still is in many European countries. He suggests that layoffs, like cigarettes, should come with a warning label, designed to shift the stigma surrounding job loss from the workers who are victims of it to the executives who see human suffering as the unfortunate cost of doing business. It’s also because, in a society that teaches us to base much of our identity and self-worth on our jobs, a layoff-which usually has little to do with one’s performance at work-can destroy an individual’s self-confidence for years to come, with devastating effects on their mental health and the long-term course of their careers.īut as New York Times journalist and author Louis Uchitelle argues in his 2007 book The Disposable American, the working world doesn’t need to be so cruel. It’s not just because of the difficulty of finding a new job, although research shows it’s significantly harder to get hired when you’re unemployed, and only becomes more difficult the longer you’re out of work. It’s not just because of the financial hardships that are involved with losing one’s job, although 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. It should be no surprise that layoffs can cause deep harm to the people who experience them. Losing your job ranks among the 10 most stressful life events on the Holmes-Rahe Stress Inventory, a scale used to estimate people’s vulnerability to major health breakdowns. Of course, for the people who actually lose their jobs, it’s a very different story. And even then, as with Deutsche Bank, the layoffs are often discussed more as an indicator of a company’s struggles and strategic turns than as a life-changing disaster for huge numbers of human beings. Mass layoffs like these tend to disappear fairly quickly from the mainstream news cycle, grabbing headlines for just a few days.
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