Hope collection

How can policymakers and practitioners use insights on asset ownership and employment outcomes to better support older workers facing job loss?

Practical Advice/Tips for Practitioners

• Employers should implement career transition programs including financial literacy training that emphasises leveraging asset ownership to cushion adverse effects of job loss for older workers.

• Community organisations should offer dedicated financial advisory services that educate older workers on managing asset portfolios and managing transitions effectively after job loss.

• Financial regulators should review policies to safeguard older workers from asset devaluation and promote equitable access to asset-building opportunities during downturns and job loss periods.

• Researchers should collaborate to refine integrated models that examine how asset ownership and job conditions interact, generating insights to inform more effective policies for older workers.

• Policymakers should design targeted support programs for older workers who lack sufficient asset wealth in housing, superannuation and other areas to protect themselves and their dependents following the adverse effects of job loss. Such programs should recognise that older workers in this position are far more likely to be women.

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.

Full paper access

Barnes, Tom. (2023). Rethinking job loss in an age of assetisation : Lessons from the study of precarious older workers. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. 56(3), pp. 717-735. 

Contact the researcher

Associate Professor Tom Barnes
tom.barnes@acu.edu.au

Learn more about Associate Professor Tom Barnes’s research