What It's Like to be Sacked

Anxieties at work

Being sacked leads to mental and physical ill-health, and job insecurity is just as damaging, writes Elisabeth Wynhausen

March 31, 2006

THOUGH he had been sacked, the man got up early every morning as he always had and went out as if he were going to work. He had been a road worker employed by a government department. But when he was sacked, he couldn't bring himself to tell his wife and family.

"He couldn't face the reality of the situation," says Michael Curtin, managing director of management company Lee Hecht Harrison. By the time one of Curtin's consultants started counselling him, the former road worker, who was in his 50s, had been getting up and pretending to go to work for three or four months.

"For many men, their work is themselves," GPs4Men national convener Greg Malcher says. "Take away their work and you take away a fair chunk of their soul." Malcher was sacked from a job in medicine many years ago. He says he felt as if his heart had been torn out, and he went home and cried.

If some of the gloomier predictions about the effects of the Howard Government's workplace revolution come true, this could soon be a common scenario.

There are 1500 pages of new or revised workplace laws and regulations, but if there is one aspect of the changed IR environment that gives employers the whip hand it is that they have what John Robertson, secretary of Unions NSW, calls "an unfettered right to sack anyone".

"They can't discriminate based on religion age or gender. But if they don't like something else about you they can sack you," Robertson points out.

Companies with fewer than 100 employees have the right to sack them for no reason. Provisions allowing larger companies to dismiss for "operational reasons" can, according to legal experts, give them the power to sack anyone. Employers who sack people on the grounds that the office is being restructured will not be confronted with the spectre of unfair dismissal, at least until the clause is tested in the courts. That is bound to happen sooner or later, with the bill already being portrayed as a lawyers' picnic.

Only last week, Employment and Workplace Relations Minister Kevin Andrews agreed that employers could now get rid of employees if they didn't like them or found them abrasive. "Sometimes relationships don't work out," he said on ABC television. Meanwhile, Prime Minister John Howard told a Melbourne radio announcer: "Some people who have been a disruptive influence in a small firm may not find it as easy to remain."

But it is hard to find out if the senior members of a government making it easier for employers to fire people have ever been sacked from a job themselves.

"I don't know if we'll bother responding to that," says Ian Hanke, spokesman for Andrews' office.

Proponents of the workplace reforms invariably allude to the economic benefits in the offing but some of the changes may involve social costs yet to be calculated.

"Chronic anxiety about the certainty of your continued employment is a major cause of stress," says Ian Hickie, executive director of the Brain and Mind Research Institute at the University of Sydney, who believes that it is not so much the sacking itself that affects a person's health but the corrosive uncertainty that precedes and follows it. "It's the continuous worry that kills you."

IT'S NOT ABOUT THE MONEY

LARGE companies retrenching workers may call in outplacement experts, a service paid for by the employer.

Management consultants say people will sometimes express relief.

"We had someone who still experienced the feelings of sadness, anxiety, fear and anger. But he talked about it as a liberating experience," management consultant Katerina Papamarkou says.

Most people who are sacked walk away and get on with their lives. Though she has since found a job she loves, Lisa Burns says she was devastated when she was suddenly sacked as the co-ordinator of a community organisation. Burns, 43, had taken the job because she wanted to challenge herself after 10 years with another organisation, but says there was resistance to some of the changes she instituted and after four months she found herself on the street.

It was the first time she had been fired. "It's soul destroying to be sacked. You just don't expect it," she says. Burns took her case to the Australian Industrial Relations Commission and her employer settled. "The settlement to me was never, ever about the money; it was sort of like this independent tribunal had to judge what happened, to prove that I wasn't a bad worker. To prove what happened to me was unfair."

If the new workplace environment creates more uncertainty, says Hickie, "it's likely to have an adverse effect on the mental and physical health of people in the work force". He believes those most affected will be young people, trying to figure out what it is they should be doing with their lives while struggling to secure steady employment, a mirage for increasing numbers of people under 25. Other mental health professionals warn that a sudden spate of firings could have dire consequences.

"The most stressful thing in people's lives is when some decision is made about them in which they have no say," Mental Health Foundation of Australia chairman Graham Burrows says. "It's very stressful if someone terminates you and you don't know what the reasons were or if it comes out of the blue."

This is exactly what happened to Sydney woman Donna Niemann, 42, a single mother with two teenage sons. Until a January afternoon nine weeks ago, Niemann was a supervisor for a food distribution company. She had started out as a driver seven years ago and loved it, she says. "I put my heart and soul in the job. The week before I was terminated I worked from four in the morning three days in a row."

Though the atmosphere had changed since the company came under new management in 2004, Niemann says she had no warning she was to be dismissed.

She says she had never had any complaints about her work. But five minutes after the general manager asked her to come and have a chat with him, Niemann had been sacked.

"You come home to the kids, to let them know you've just been fired, you don't even know what you've been fired for," she says.

When she managed to absorb what had happened, she found herself consumed with anxiety. "I was stressing out that I wasn't going to get anything because of my age."

With no savings, she couldn't stop worrying about paying the rent and providing for her younger son, who lives at home with her and has just started Year 11.

But with the help of a former colleague, Niemann managed to find a job as a casual driver a few weeks later. Though she is working 38 hours a week at present and is grateful for the employment, as a casual she no longer has job security.

Niemann, a member of the shop assistants union, plans to take action over her dismissal with the union's help. "I didn't want them to get away with it," she says.

Union officials say nine out of 10 people who start such cases settle and that there are chains of stores that pay from a few thousand dollars to $15,000 to get the cases settled as quickly as possible. But Niemann contends: "It's not about money, it's about respect."

From now on, of course, sacked employees of companies with fewer than 100 workers will have no such recourse, an understandable relief for small companies previously confronted with the threat of legal action if they tried to sack unsatisfactory employees.

But it will deny those who feel they have been unfairly dismissed the chance of asserting some control over a situation that makes them feel powerless, in itself a threat to their health.

"I've known a number of men, tradesmen working for government departments, who lost their jobs when they were in their late 40s or early 50s," says labour lawyer Suzanne Jamieson, a senior lecturer in work and organisational studies at the University of Sydney. "The two I know best both died of heart attacks within a few years of being retrenched." Both had fruitlessly applied for countless jobs. "I saw them disintegrate before my eyes" Jamieson says.

Says Melbourne-based management consultant Katerina Papamarkou, from Chandler Macleod: "Where people believe they're not easily going to find work again - for example, because of their age or their lack of skills - that can affect the intensity of their emotional reaction."

People who have been fired experience grief, Burrows says. Disbelief is followed by anger, then they get depressed. "The fourth stage is to resolve it and move forward, but some people never get over it," he says. "A lot of it depends on the fortitude of the individual." Men and women alike may define themselves through the work they do, but being unable to fulfil their role as breadwinners still gives many older men the feeling of losing all sense of purpose.

Curtin says he has noticed the sense of loss reflected on their faces "They look lost," he says. "Often there's a sense of paralysis. People don't know what to do."

Unlike the women interviewed by The Australian, several of the men insist on anonymity. "It was shocking. I felt terrible," says one, a 42-year-old boilermaker who was unexpectedly fired on Christmas Eve a few years ago.

The owner of the small welding company he was working for did everything wrong, unexpectedly sacking him when he came in five minutes late one morning because the trains weren't running on time. It was the first time he had been late but he was paid off on the spot.

"I walked out with $270 and didn't work again until mid-February. Eight weeks without work," he says. The Newcastle man had never before been unemployed for more than a few days at a time. "A friend had to help me out with money 'til I could get some help from Centrelink. I felt totally useless. I felt like I was just a sponge."

He felt his friends looked at him differently "You could feel it in the air," he says. "You've been out all day, hitting the pavement, looking for work. You come home empty-handed, people think you haven't even been trying."

Though he is a member of the Amalgamated Metalworkers Union and now works in a unionised shop, he says he is warier than he was. "It makes you feel how vulnerable you really are."

The Australian