Precarity - My Own Experience

Last week's post presented a few definitions of precarity as a social and economic phenomenon.  Today I'd like to present a definition which overlaps the definitions previously given while expanding a bit on the personal side of this phenomenon.  From the standpoint of those who experience it, precarity is a state of being in which a person can't be sure that they will have enough money each month to make rent or mortgage payments, to go places by other means than walking or riding a bicycle, to keep the utilities connected, or to cover groceries for the entire month.  This can be due to not earning enough each month for the expenses listed above.  It can also be due to having a job which is in danger of disappearing even though for the present it does provide enough money to cover the bills.

Although I am an African-American and my family is African-American, I was not born into precarity, even though I was born into a time in which I and my family had to face an environment of racial hostility which was as bad as or perhaps even worse than the worst which the Trump years produced in this country.  My life from birth to adolescence was relatively secure because my dad was an officer in the military.  However, once I reached adolescence, my siblings and I found ourselves living in a broken home.  It is not my desire now to describe how this happened or who was at fault.  Indeed, at the time our home was breaking, I could not have provided such a description, as a lot of what was happening went right over my head.  All I knew at the end of it was that I was now living with one parent instead of two.  

I do not want to say anything that would be dishonoring to either of my parents.  However, for the purpose of this post, I must say that the parent with whom I ended up living chose to approach the new, constrained life we faced with a rather - shall we say, interesting - perspective.  Looking back, it seems to me that some of the elements of that perspective consisted of the notion that we should live as luxuriously as possible even if it required Divine miraculous intervention, combined with a belief system and theology heavily influenced by holy-roller Pentecostalism.  Mistakes and bad choices were therefore made, and we suffered consequences such as occasionally running out of food before the end of the month, having utilities turned off, having a car repossessed, and finding it hard to buy clothes for rapidly-growing children.  This parent was not the only source of my personal sufferings during that time.  I too was a complete and utter doofus.  To explain this further, I was an underachiever and quite lazy.  Partly this was due to the fact that I could not stand school, although I was able to do well enough when I applied myself.  But I preferred to spend my time either watching TV, listening to public radio, reading science fiction, or just prowling the neighborhood during the hours when my parent was working swing shift.  Therefore I was definitely not on the college prep track.  

During my freshman and sophomore years in high school, this sort of life was tolerable to me.  But as the Good Book says, "Whatever a man sows, that he shall also reap."  After a while the reaping grew more and more painful.  I therefore started looking for work at a local swap meet, and later got a job at a local drive-in movie theater.  And I began to worry about my future beyond high school.  I knew that I had not prepared myself adequately for college, let alone for any kind of scholarship money.  So it seemed to me that my best chance for eating and having clothes to wear after high school lay in joining the military myself.  Therefore I enlisted.

Thankfully, during my tour of duty I was never in combat and never had to shoot at anyone.  But I quickly got tired of spending my time sleeping in the woods with people whom I could hardly stand, people who got drunk at every possible opportunity.  So I served only one tour and then got out.  My experiences of adolescence had combined with my military experience to produce in me something that had not previously existed, namely a strong desire to better myself and to leave completely behind a lifestyle of just barely getting by.  So I decided to put myself through college.  My heavy exposure to science fiction moved me to choose engineering as a major.  I knew I was in for a long and hard slog to reach my goal, but now I was determined to get there.

I entered my college years with a certain perspective on the world and on the place of educated people in the world.  Part of that perspective consisted of the expectation that corporations and their white-collar workers would continue the same occupational culture which my dad had experienced during his career.  He had served in the military as an officer until he had reached the point where he could retire, then had switched to white-collar managerial work as an employee of a large defense contractor.  Later he retired from that job also and entered into a well-endowed post-retirement life.  He was part of a corporate and occupational culture in which corporations lasted for decades and entered into what I call long-term care arrangements with their best and most loyal employees.  This meant that those who worked for these corporations for a long enough time could expect a guaranteed pension and the sort of stereotypical retirement send-off in which the boss would give the new retiree a gold watch.

The reality I experienced was rather different from this, to say the least.  When I first left the military and moved back to Southern California, I got a job at a defense plant in order to support myself while I was in school.  This was in the last years of the Cold War, and we thought the Cold War would last for decades more.  Therefore we thought our defense plant and others like it would continue in much the same way that public utility companies continued decade after decade.  But then the Berlin Wall fell, and for a time, geopolitical shifts destroyed the economic security of a number of defense contractors.  The plant I worked for was eventually converted to a shopping center.  Many, many people were laid off.

After I obtained my bachelors degree, I went to work for an engineering firm which had once done cutting-edge work for the U.S. Department of Defense and NASA during the space race and the arms race.  However, both national and global political shifts had caused most of that work to dry up by the time I came on board.  The military work never completely dried up.  However, during my first few years at that firm, we worked on prisons (a fact of which I am now ashamed), as well as MEP (mechanical, electrical, and plumbing) design for a number of fast food joints (we're talking about places as small as a typical Taco Bell or McDonald's), gas stations, and amusement parks.  When I first joined that firm a new employee could enroll in the company pension program.  But within a few years, the pension program was replaced entirely by a 401k/ESOP program.  Only the old-timers got anything like a gold watch.  And not a few of those old-timers got the ax during one of several down-sizing periods.  There were times when the cubicle farm in which I worked looked to me like a town in Europe of the Middle Ages must have looked after the bubonic plague had swept through it.  Picture a town with lots of suddenly empty houses.

A major factor which began to affect my engineering discipline (and hence the stability of my career) was the beginning and later acceleration of the automation of many elements of the design process.  This took place as design software companies added functions in their software for the rapid performance of both drafting, layout, and computational tasks which had formerly required humans to do things by hand.  Some of those people I knew who got the ax had been among those who refused to learn the new technology.

My first experience of precarity had been due to personal foolishness on the part of myself and my relatives.  This led me to take the path of education as a means of escape.  I do not in the least regret taking that path.  However, in leaving one realm and entering another, I unwittingly entered a realm of accelerating precarity caused by accelerating large-scale economic and technological shifts outside of my control.  Those shifts were driven by the following factors:

• The destruction of restrictions on capital flows as a result of the deregulation that began under former President Ronald Reagan in the 1980's.  This led to the following:
• An increasing attempt by corporations to try to grow profits by financial trickery, by mergers and acquisitions, and by cutting costs related to long-standing covenants with workers.
• An increasing volatility in the corporate landscape, with long-standing publicly-traded firms suddenly being threatened by either the consequences of ill-advised decisions, or the threat of hostile takeovers, or by the blowing and bursting of economic bubbles, or by the saturation of existing markets.
• The shrinkage of available resources for large-scale transformative megaprojects.  This shrinkage was driven by:
• The political and economic conservatism of Republican administrations in the United States from 1980 onward.  This conservatism tended to lead to cuts in any kind of programs (such as the space program) which had aspirational goals related to the betterment of humankind, although the Republicans always seemed to be able to find money for national defense and law enforcement.  (Unfortunately, however, due to recent Russian thuggishness, it appears that the generous U.S. outlays for defense have been necessary!)
• The beginning of the actual shrinkage of the resource base available for the global and national industrial economies.
• The beginning and later acceleration of changes wrought in work (both manufacturing and knowledge work) wrought by the introduction of automation, advances in telecommunication technology and artificial intelligence.

These factors include things that society can and should collectively decide to reverse, such as the choices and policies of rabid free-market late capitalism.  However, some of these factors should be regarded as inevitable factors that are leading to inexorable changes in the way we procure a living for ourselves and the landscape in which we earn that living.  Seeing such factors in this way should motivate each of us to make whatever personal and communal changes we need to make in order to survive the coming changes.  The technological changes are especially significant, since those who refuse to adjust themselves to prepare for these will wind up being steamrolled by the technological juggernaut.  Each of us may find that he or she needs to engage in a process of constant personal re-education and reinvention.

As for me, I have worked for a few engineering firms since that first firm I encountered after graduating from college.  Some of their offices have gone out of business due to the flat-footedness of managers who were not able to make the mental adjustment to rapidly changing markets and circumstances.  Some of these firms continue to do well to the present day, although their employees must pay certain costs in terms of extensive travel and sometimes long hours.  The challenge for employees is to find an occupational path which provides economic security without working a person to death or imposing unacceptable costs in other parts of the person's life such as his or her family life.  In a future post I will argue that the Great Resignation has provided a temporary boost to workers seeking to navigate such a path.