Job Security, Relooked

I talked to my nephew today. As usual, he’s concerned about his job insecurity, which promotes anxiety, about which he believes I’m an expert. (Unfortunately, he’s right.) Kevin has been a senior engineer with a very large computing company for fifteen years, likes what he does, and would like to get at least his twenty years in. Since I know him as a very creative guy I normally steer him away from his immediate anxiety-induced paranoias and ask him about what projects he has done lately to bring value to the company. And there is always one he’s most excited about. These are projects that generally allow his company to do its work with more efficiency and less man-hours.

Today’s project is a beauty and, putting my own head for numbers to work for a few seconds, it seemed to me it will save several million dollars in his own region and has every possibility of being taken nation-wide as each region is currently capable of using this increased efficiency for its own benefit. Since I have literally known him his whole life and have talked to him irregularly on this subject for low these fifteen years, I have seen him do things like this for the whole of his employment. He’s also won employee of the year awards and the equivalent and has been recognized for his value-adding behavior repeatedly, even to the point of being put in charge of national roll-outs of his inventions.

So where is the problem? Understandably he’s an anxious guy, literally suffering every time I talk to him because of it. Anxiety itself is a liar, in that whatever you are anxious about, things will turn out differently and the exact thing you are worried about will not happen. Plus, as I’ve shared before, anxiety is a future- or past-oriented malady. You can always test whether you are anxious about something that’s real in present time by simply asking yourself “Am I safe?”, modified to fit the situation. For instance, Kevin could simply ask himself “Am I in danger of losing my job today? Has anybody said anything to me about it? Are we going through a force reduction in my area?” And if the answer to these and similar questions is no, then the anxiety about losing his job is false as far as those things are concerned.

But as I asked questions about his projects and then about his anxiety, it turns out that this time he is concerned about something more real, although not yet present-tense. He is worried that President Biden’s tops-down initiative to pressure (especially the large) companies to vaccinate all their employees against Covid may result in his finally deciding as to whether or not he will accept being vaccinated. So far he is a firm anti-vaxer, is well-read on the whole subject (although I’m super skeptical of what he’s been reading….another subject for another time, yeah?), and neither he nor any of his family has as yet gotten a vaccine (although he does insist he’s already had Covid anyway, without any testing to prove it, of course).

Fueling his internal fires, at least one company of similar size to his has already gone the “insistence” route, mandating that all management employees must get vaccinated, under pain I suppose of immediate death, torture or worse. So far, this other company has not insisted that non-management employees get vaccinated, and in Kevin’s opinion this is unlikely both in the other company and his because of a strong union influence which to this moment is not in favor of forcing vaccines on people. (Kevin himself is non-management.)

It doesn’t seem to me that Kevin is in any immediate danger of losing his job because of company mandates, and truth be known would they want to lose  a performer like him? Sometimes it doesn’t matter much in large corporations about the value-add of one person, I get that, but to the extent his regional management could protect him I’m sure they would, or at least I used to try to protect my best employees albeit in different circumstances.

However, all of this brings up a couple of interesting issues. First, it’s obvious that President Biden is pursuing a political agenda. He’s trying to make good on his campaign promise to get ahead of the Covid Curse and shut it down. He’s doing that in part through political pressure on large companies because it’s  easier to get traction there than to mandate it to even small companies, as who is going to enforce it?

But doesn’t all this get right in the face of the Constitutional rights of the individual? Eventually the company, mandated by the government to present their own ultimatums about vaccines to their troops, will find themselves under great pressure to do something about it. But will each employee then need to choose for themselves, to either accept a vaccine irrespective of whether they believe in it or think it harmful, or lose their jobs, no matter how great an employee he or she may be?

I don’t have an answer to the underlying question about the Constitutionality of this. My own belief is that you have the right to do just about anything legal that you want to do, until and unless you doing that thing interferes with MY right to do some other legal thing. The purpose of government, again based on that thinking, is that government must do for people those things that are in the interests of the majority that those people cannot do as well for themselves. And further I believe the Federal Government has the superseding authority to tell the State Governments to stick it where the sun don’t shine when it comes to these matters of the common good.

So certainly, reigning in the pandemic is in the common national interest, isn’t it? I mean, when one out of 500 Americans has already died from Covid, and when every week we lose more people to the disease than the country lost across 20 years of the Afghan War, or when we lose more people to the disease every three days then we did in the horror of 9/11, doesn’t it make common sense to just eradicate the sucker and be done with it? Go back and do a little homework; look up TB, Smallpox and Polio. Even Measles. Lots of examples around about vaccines having worked to help eliminate these pernicious enemies.

Where all this leaves Kevin I really don’t know. And where it leaves the country, I don’t know either. I do know that the common good should be driven by common sense, but it seems common sense ain’t all that common these days, is it?