The market hates you, and other lessons learned too late

Being fired has never worried me much. Even during bright economic times, I've known plenty of folks who regularly stayed up nights convinced that they were on the verge of termination for some offhand comment or fleeting mistake they'd made on the job that day.

Almost always, the boss hadn't even noticed or didn't care. Not that that stopped them from losing sleep the next time they filed a TPS report in the wrong drawer.

Experiences like that definitely informed my view on job security, but I was different from most employees right from the start. In college, some trusting soul believed that I could be trusted to oversee the summer tenants of the new apartment-style dorm. My tenure was cut tragically short after it was alleged that my residents enjoyed somewhat more relaxed alcohol policies than those outlined in the student handbook and that my roommates had somehow learned to circumvent the brand-new security system.

Even then, consigned to several weeks of couch surfing before the next semester started, I was more relieved than upset. I was getting tired of being "the man," and I still had a few dollars and a new girlfriend who would now have no choice but to let me sleep over. Unfortunately, sudden unemployment turned out not to be the fast track to her heart.

I realize now that my laissez-faire attitude toward employment is a luxury of someone who has never been truly poor. Even at my lowest point, I still had a bed in a heated apartment and all the Pop-Tarts I could eat. While I did eventually learn the exquisitely sharp focus a rejected debit card can bring to a man's life, I've never feared that things would not get better.

If one were going to fear such a thing, though, now might be an appropriate time. Anyone reading this is likely aware that the Reno Gazette-Journal's parent company is eliminating more than 2,000 jobs this month, including 61 locally. It sucks. It's scary in the grand scheme of things, especially for those of us suddenly seeking work in a damaged business deep in the bowels of a recession. And yet these days, it's not an especially remarkable action.

Think about that for a second. Just a few years ago, a payroll cut of 15 percent in most industry-leading companies would have been a Wall Street-rocking, bourbon-swilling disaster for everyone involved, from the day trader trying to unload a quarter-million shares all the way down to the grunt on the work floor. Now it's just the cost of doing business in an unpredictable marketplace: One in 10 families may be asked to forgo dinner for the good of the shareholders.

I'm being melodramatic, of course. History shows that most folks will get by (although perhaps not in the high style to which they've become accustomed) and that a volatile market does not necessarily mean the end of the world.

As one executive recently put it, every forest must endure an occasional wildfire if it is to remain healthy.

But you'll notice that the people using these clever nature metaphors tend to be the guys with flamethrowers rather than the saplings going up in flames. This is no doubt a hard time for everyone, but anyone arguing that a middle manager being asked to fire a friend is suffering just as much as a single mom who got her walking papers from Chromalloy two weeks before Christmas needs to get out more.

Which brings us to a lesson that I, like much of my generation, have not had to learn until now: Your employer is not your friend. No matter how well it treats you or how many of your real friends it employs, it is just an entity that exists to serve a purpose. And unless you are self-employed, that purpose is not to take care of you. Your well-being is at best a happy side-effect and at worst a regrettable but necessary expense. All workers are ultimately disposable and the most painful part of the current crisis is that it is making millions of people who believed they were exceptional face that fact.

So now what? Is this the part where we pull ourselves up by our American-made bootstraps and march out of the woods once more? Where a cool new president crashes through the boardroom door and saves the hostages in the nick of time? No one can know. But when I was informed last week that I had somehow wandered onto the express train to the poor house, the first thing I did was reach out to other workers, both to help them and to help myself. Whatever happens, I'm pretty sure the only way most of us are going to get out of this mess is together.