The newly jobless will need support
Redundancy hits workers hard, and they deserve better support as unemployment rises, writes Rob Stock.
Unemployment spiralling towards double digits has prompted calls for recognition of the personal trauma of joblessness, and the launch of a national workforce retraining support package.
Not since the early 1990s has the unemployment rate topped 10 per cent, but so far the Covid-19 economic crisis management has focused on supporting businesses to keep people employed, not supporting people ejected from the workforce.
Grim 1990s unemployment sparked academics to study the mental and physical effects of redundancy, including an increased chance of early death, and Wellingtonian Denis Hunt believes the Government needs to fund a national retraining programme to give hope and skills to people whose jobs are sacrificed in the fight to eradicate Covid-19.
Hunt, aged 69, gets out most days during lockdown in his Corporate Cab as a volunteer taking food parcels to poor households.
Hunt drives a cab after a fruitless search for work when he was made redundant from a corporate management role.
‘‘I was more frustrated than angry, it felt like a bit of a waste. In my particular case, my expertise was food export, but nobody wanted it,’’ he recalls.
It was a dark time for him. Despite having a supportive partner in fulltime work, Hunt experienced many of the negative effects of redundancy and joblessness, including a decline in wellbeing and mental health.
There was a complete lack of support to retrain, says Hunt, who would have liked to have seen out his working life in the IT industry.
‘‘That would have been perfect for me.’’
In the era of mass Covid-19 related redundancies, Hunt believes the Government needs to create a national training strategy to upskill those left jobless, including funding for those who could not afford to retrain themselves.
‘‘With a bit of foresight, this would be an ideal opportunity to retrain people,’’ Hunt says, and he’s not alone.
Infometrics chief forecaster Gareth Kiernan says the rush of job losses announced over the past few weeks is just the tip of the iceberg.
‘‘We expect many more insolvencies to occur and jobs to be lost in coming months, with businesses unable to survive the big drop in revenue caused by the pandemic and the necessary public health response.
‘‘The Government will have an important role in helping unemployed workers to retrain, as well as fostering new businesses, which will ultimately be the key to replacing those jobs and businesses that have been lost during the pandemic,’’ Kiernan says.
Hunt’s interest is not just in retraining to get people back into work so they can participate in rebuilding the ravaged economy, but also because he understands the dismal void caused by joblessness.
‘‘You need to be doing something useful, or the mental health starts to suffer,’’ he says.
Paulette Brazzale at the Auckland University of Technology (AUT) department of management says that even in the best of times, the effects of redundancy are likened by those who have experienced it to the death of a loved one.
Brazzale began studying people’s recent redundancy experiences after she was laid off as supply chain manager at McDonalds just after the global financial crisis.
‘‘None of them experienced what I feel may be coming, that deprivation of not having money,’’ she says.
‘‘But even though they didn’t suffer greatly financially, being made redundant was a hugely significant life event.
‘‘Many of them listed it along with getting married, or the death of a partner, as one of those big life events.’’
She found people’s identities were often linked to their workplace, and their profession, and being made redundant unsettled their sense of self, and their fundamental beliefs, such as trusting that people were treated in the way they deserved.
The impacts of redundancy are felt most by those who struggle to get back into meaningful work.
A 2013 report on the impact of major job losses in small communities highlighted how heavily the blow of redundancy fell.
‘‘Apart from the effect on physical and mental health, unemployed people may suffer financial hardship, and the loss of social contacts, networks,’’ according to the Canterbury District Health Board report.
‘‘They may also feel that they have lost the identity they had in the workplace and are no longer making a meaningful contribution to society.’’
The jobless experienced higher levels of deprivation, anxiety, social isolation and stigmatisation from a society that blamed them for their own plight.
Redundancy’s emotional hammer fell hardest on people who loved and were highly committed to their jobs.
There were also higher rates of suicide and attempted suicide among unemployed people.
One study followed 1945 meat workers in Hawke’s Bay after the Whakatu plant closed, comparing their lives in the following eight years to 1767 workers from a plant that remained open over a period of eight years.
The Whakatu plant ex-workers experienced more than twice the mental distress and self-harm of the workers whose plant stayed open.
Men have historically experienced more acute suffering after being made redundant.
When the small Waikato town of Huntly saw the coal-mining industry decimated by restructuring in the 1980s, the impacts on ex-miners showed them struggling with losses of income, identity and the camaraderie of mining.
‘‘Amongst some of the miners there was a sense of shame and stigma about having to sign up for the unemployment benefit, and so some did not,’’ the Canterbury District Health Board reported says.
‘‘There had been a culture of the ‘male provider’: when miners lost their jobs, they felt worthless and unwanted, leading to anger, frustration and lowered self-esteem.’’
The community fractured. People left, some heading overseas to Australian mines. Domestic violence and suicide increased.
‘‘A lot of the workforce will be waiting nervously thinking, ‘I hope this lockdown comes off so I can go back to work’,’’ says Jarrod Haar at AUT’s Work Research Institute.
‘‘I see the scenarios are anything from 10 per cent to 25 per cent. If we had anything like 20 to 25 per cent, one-in-four people losing their jobs, not only will it be people dying of heart attacks, suicide rates will go up,’’ Haar says.
People will literally be dying for work, he says. Haar hopes the wider public will show more empathy for those losing their jobs as a result of the Covid-19 crisis than they did in the 1980s and 1990s economic restructuring.
‘‘People haven’t lost their jobs because they are poor performers. People have lost their jobs because they have no business,’’ he says.
‘‘I think we will have lots of sympathy for people who lose their jobs.
‘‘Not only more sympathy for people who have
‘‘If we had anything like 20 to 25 per cent [unemployment] not only will it be people dying of heart attacks, suicide rates will go up.’’ Jarrod Haar of AUT’s Work Research Institute
lost their work, but greater understanding that people suffer psychologically in these times, and that therefore we should be sensitive to people who have lost their jobs.’’
He also calls on employers to be fair-minded, especially to older workers who experience ageism in the most benign of job markets.
‘‘If you’re in your mid-50s, and you lose work, we do know that they struggle to be hired, so perhaps there’s a good call out for employers to be open,’’ Haar says.
Hunt says that with a glut of unemployed, the age at which recruiters will deem people to be ‘‘old’’ will drop by five years.
‘‘They’re worried, they’re scared. They’re apprehensive,’’ says Ian Fraser, the founder of Seniors at Work employment agency for ‘‘mature workers’’ trying to find work.
‘‘If you are a mature worker there is a sense of hopelessness, and helplessness, and absolute despair.’’
Any Government support and retraining package for workers would have to take account of social distancing.
Pushpa Wood from Massey University’s Financial Education Centre says the Government should be funding retraining, including through online ‘‘micro-credential’’ courses delivered by polytechs and universities.
‘‘Massey is looking at short courses for people to retrain, and I think the Government should intervene to see that happens,’’ she says.
‘‘I would say to the Government, ‘Look at all the institutions you have got. Look at their strengths, and which institution can deliver in a particular area.
‘‘We cannot afford duplication.’’