The personal experience of long-term unemployment is one people rarely share, for completely understandable reasons. There’s a bit of superstition that saying it out loud will bed it in, and there’s always one person in 100 who will choose to explain away the misfortune as your own personal failing.
Even if they’re clearly in the grip of superstitions of their own – trying to ward off your fate for themselves – it’s hard not to take criticism personally in such a personal situation. The conventions of human interaction are that you shouldn’t really mention a cloud unless you have a silver lining handy. For instance: after the financial crash in 2008, I remember hearing a couple interviewed on the radio who had both been made redundant when the private school they worked for closed down. After describing months of fruitless job applications, the wife ended saying they’d been able to spend much more time in their allotment, and she reckoned their rocket yield alone had saved them a small fortune. That, I thought, is a remarkable and yet probably universal commitment to looking on the bright side.
So when someone breaks the omertà – as Stacey Duguid did on Instagram three weeks ago – the conversation explodes like any that’s been waiting a long time to happen.
Duguid, 52, after a varied and high-achieving career in fashion and journalism, has spent more than a year sending out 150 job applications, many of which don’t even get replies. When she said that out loud, thousands of women messaged her with similar experiences. Accordingly, it has been taken as an “older woman” or, more bluntly, a perimenopause story, which is borne out by the data – 30% of women aged 50 to 64 are economically inactive in the UK, against 22% of men – but I’d want to see more field work before I’d settle for hormones as the main reason.
Age-wise, this is also peak time for the “sandwich years”. They’re called that to describe a person trapped between childcare and elderly parents, and the term is not especially accurate, since childcare and end-of-life care are as different from one another as two bits of bread are similar. But as euphemisms go, it works, because what could be more practical and manageable than a sandwich?
By contrast, keeping regular working hours while remaining available for the sudden and irregular crises that attend the end of a life is completely impossible. My sister quit her job while our mum was dying, and it was only because she did that I didn’t have to. In other words: yes, the gender split makes sense, but no, more HRT probably isn’t the silver bullet, and don’t even start looking for a lining. This is a silver-free scenario.
For many at the start of their careers, things are just as bad. Government analysis last month insisted that entry-level positions were declining in line with the rest of the job market, but the general feeling that AI is wiping out starter jobs is backed up by research. The sectors worst hit are the most AI-friendly – software engineers, accountants, legal assistants, data analysts. A year ago, figures showed new graduate vacancies had dropped by a third since the arrival of ChatGPT. Applicants themselves describe the harrowing experience of being rejected in less than the time it would have taken for any human to read their application – in other words, by AI.
This creates a pipeline problem for employers, who will eventually land in a world where there’s no one to fill the middle tier of their staff hierarchy with the experience of having done the grunt work at the bottom. But being able to say “serves you right”, not even to a person but to a sector, lacks some quality of emotional satisfaction.
Can ageism be the issue, in a system that punishes the workforce at both ends, and traps everyone who has a job in a terrorised, scarcity mindset? Is AI really on the brink of making all human endeavour obsolete, or have AI companies just made some vast claims for it that shortsighted employers are choosing to believe, ultimately at their own expense? We’ll never find out in generational or gender silos, and the code of silence isn’t helping, either. It’s important to keep your skills updated, the employment coaches always say – the trait this modern world demands is openness. Only in talking about worklessness does it become clear: it’s not a you problem, it’s an everyone problem.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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