Fears over our job security have intensified with COVID-19 onset

Instability of massive layoffs and loss of income has rattled Canadians’ collective nerves

The feeling that you might lose your job is upsetting enough during “normal” times.

We know that job insecurity undermines psychological health, but it can also erode our sense of personal control, leaving us feeling powerless to shape the events and outcomes of our everyday lives.

This can diminish motivation and the effectiveness of coping efforts, increasing our vulnerability to the healthharming effects of stress.

Sociologists have long demonstrated that although powerlessness is a subjective perception, it is rooted in objective conditions like the state of our livelihood.

A study in the journal Work and Occupations by Paul Glavin at McMaster University demonstrates this by finding greater powerlessness among workers with job insecurity. That was during a period of relative stability.

The rapid onset of the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically disrupted the social and economic lives of Canadians, causing uncertainty across the socioeconomic spectrum, especially among those in more precarious circumstances.

The instability of massive layoffs and loss of income has rattled our collective nerves, so the spike in the level of job insecurity isn’t surprising. But I also suspect it has transformed the way job insecurity feels to Canadians.

Has the powerlessness of job insecurity intensified?

In September 2019, not anticipating a global pandemic, I collected national data from 2,500 workers in an effort to profile the quality of work and economic life in Canada. Then, as COVID-19 emerged and we began witnessing an abrupt and far-reaching restructuring of employment and severe economic disruption, I decided to repeat the same survey the week of March 17, 2020.

I asked a commonly used question to measure perceived job insecurity: “How likely is it that during the next one to two years you will lose your present job and have to look for a job with another employer?”

I also asked Canadians the extent to which they agree or disagree with statements such as, “You have little control over the things that happen to you” and “There is really no way you can solve some of the problems you have.”

It isn’t surprising that levels of job insecurity and powerlessness have both increased by about five per cent from September to mid-March — a trend that will likely continue. But has the intensity of the powerlessness linked to job insecurity increased?

By the third week of March, some striking patterns had surfaced. The percentage of insecure workers who express a sense of powerlessness increased to 61 per cent from 47 per cent. That pain isn’t equally shared; it intensified among workers who held less than a university degree, those with annual household incomes between $25,000$50,000, older workers, and those who work in majority-female occupations or the gig economy.

The sting of job insecurity has always been real, but it just got very real. Its effect on powerlessness intensified more severely for some than others, and those shock waves are likely to reverberate even more in the months ahead. Scott Schieman is chair of the department of sociology at the University of Toronto, St. George.