Who assumes the obligation of providing "job security"?

There exists in business law the concept of limited liability to permit and foster the creation of capital. Society has agreed to not hold the owners of a corporation responsibel for debts and actions of a business.

In exchange for the creation of a separate corporation comes an expectation of corporate responsibility to promote the social welfare. Included in that expectation is : don’t pollute the commons, charge a fair price, don’t commit illegal acts, and treat your employees fairly and honorably.

A better way of stating it is to replace your pejorative use of “entitlement” with the term “expectation”. Employees should be able to expect that employers are not capricious, obey employment law, treat people fairly, and pay equitably. In return for fair employment, employees are expected to put in a day’s labor.

Job security is the expectation that if I work well and contribute to the success of the company, I will continue to be employed. I won’t get canned so the boss’s nephew takes my place. I won’t come to work to find the gates padlocked because the CEO took millions to fleece the public.

I think that there used to be a societal understanding – not written down, but sort of a social contract, that if you were honest and did your job, the employer wouldn’t can you except for the most serious of financial reasons.

(I just noticed what @zenvelo wrote – his paragraphs 3–4 are right on).

The last 20–30 years – probably since the Reagan years – that implied social contract has largely diminished. The concept of “we all help each other at work” has turned to be “profits at the expense of everything else”. Shame.

Most of the time when I hear the term used, “job security” is spoken of in a sarcastic or ironic way. For example, when the processes in various large corporations get screwed up, which happens all the time because of the complexity of the various legal jurisdictions across which we operate, the complexity of the products themselves, and the changing processes and people intended to handle these things – and the ever-present desire to “do it cheaper; do it quicker; do it with fewer moving parts and people” – then there’s always going to be work required to fix the problems. So every mistake means “job security” (in that sarcastic way) to fix the inevitable problems that the mistake creates.

In another context, most industrial companies in the developed world continually try to get the same work products completed from overseas work forces that, because of the differences in wages paid between, say, China and the United States, mean “we can buy it from China for less”. But the Chinese (and the Indians, another source for us) don’t currently know how to make it at the quality levels and reliability or with the speed that we demand. So we end up having to train our replacements.

I get that. I understand the need to continually drive production costs lower, and I have spent a lot of time “training my replacement”. In fact, I’ve spent more time attempting to train many replacements than I spent gaining some of the experience in the first place. That has become its own kind of “job security”.

And as all of this is going on, the world around us is changing, too. The products the world requires now are not the same ones that we made when we started the process of moving my colleagues’ and my jobs overseas, so we’re having to learn to make new products – and simultaneously train others how to do the same thing we’re learning ourselves. And that has also become a kind of job security: we get paid to learn the new thing, then paid to teach it to others, and paid again to find and correct the flaws in the products made by others.

I learned early on in my working career that there is no such thing as an ownership right to a job. One’s only security lies in the ability to exchange with others; to provide something that they need in return for the things that one needs. But that’s okay, because it seems like there is always plenty to do.

Really, no one gets it. Probably, unions come closest to providing job security with grievance processes and seniority.

Good point, @marinelife. There’s an article on FB today from The Atlantic Monthly, about Right to Work states. In hurricane prone areas, if you leave the area due to the hurricane, your employer can still fire you. For us in a union, that’s a preposterous notion. (I linked the article in the FB Fluther group a few hours ago).