Rethinking job loss in an age of assetisation: Lessons from the study of precarious older workers

Abstract

Studies of job loss and deindustrialisation have tended to reproduce findings of long-term disadvantage for people and places. Far from purely reflecting matters of historical interest, recent studies have found that deindustrialisation exhibits a ‘half-life’ in which effects linger for generations after major closures. But these literatures are yet to fully consider job loss in contemporary societies where workers’ lives have been transformed by assetisation. Historical studies of deindustrialisation have tended to focus on times and places where assets were marginal to working-class peoples’ lives. Combining insights from parallel literatures on deindustrialisation, job loss and assetisation, this article addresses the questions: How important is asset ownership for workers during mass closure events? And to what extent does asset ownership generate new fault-lines of inequality between workers when confronted with job loss and its aftermath? These questions are addressed by quantifying financial outcomes, home ownership, and retirement arrangements for a group of nearly 900 older workers whose long careers were extinguished by major plant closures in 2017. While findings demonstrate that workers with greater asset ownership were relatively protected from the negative impacts of unemployment and precarious work, they also contribute to recent debate about the role of labour in the asset economy by pointing to the dynamic interaction of assets and employment over the working life course; that outcomes from job loss are shaped by the interaction of assets and employment, not assets or employment.