Illusion of Job Security in Today's Economy

What if the algorithm isn’t your audience and the grind isn’t your path to growth? We open the door on a season of deliberate change: combining four sites into one living hub, rebuilding a platform we actually own, and choosing strategy over endless posting. Along the way, we pull on a headline that should make anyone who values work stop short: a cleaner dismissed after 17-hour days across two jobs for 16 years. Policy debates aside, we ask a harder question—who gets punished for showing up, and who writes the rules that decide what’s “too much”?

From there we go wide. Morning rituals become more than habits; they’re shields against targeted media that scripts your mood by postcode and age. We talk about cycles—beginnings we celebrate, endings we avoid—and the quiet truth that some roles were priced to fit budgets, not drea

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Chapters

• 0:00 Building My Own Platform
• 2:20 Routine, Mood, And Media Hygiene
• 3:08 Transition To Self‑Employment
• 4:15 Creator Network And Sovereign Space
• 6:35 How Media Targets Our Lives
• 7:49 The Cleaner, Two Jobs, And Punishment
• 10:35 Pay, Promotion, And Hidden Barriers
• 13:05 Strategy Over Grind
• 15:20 Cycles, Security, And Illusions
• 18:10 Global Markets And Local Dreams
• 21:10 Contracts, Risk, And “Job Security”
• 24:00 Migration, Work Others Avoid, And Worth
• 27:10 Personal Reflections, Place, And Pace
• 30:20 What We Trade For A Paycheque
• 33:30 Survival, Suppression, And Open Doors
• 42:10 Closing And Listener Reflections

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

Hi there, welcome to Empowerment Diaries, Lita, Goddess of Growth here. And it has been a while. It's always a bit of a gap between my podcasts, and I acknowledge that it is something that I have been using as a form of a transition from social media to creating my very own platform. I have been working on a website. I had four which I combined to one. Lita Goddess of Growth is a hub that I am working on with limited resources. I am using a host to build my website almost on a daily basis. Yes, the days are still long. I do the day job to supplement, well, look after all that needs to be paid for survival. And I'm often here working till midnight, working on my website, learning how to do pages, put my blogs in place. I still have a number of podcasts that I need to upload to the website. I've moved from a season in my life where I was being encouraged to post short clips, three, four, in the early days up to ten times a day, hoping to get the algorithms, attention, build an account, get followers and the sorts that life is well and truly past me. I do need to rejoin social media, but on my terms. In the meantime, I have as always done my best to keep up with the news. I do not watch the news on a daily basis, like most people. I do have a habit to do a bit of scrolling and I will pick out a few highlights. I try to make sure that my day is quite focused early in the morning, a bit of meditation, coffee. It is a routine. I understand that my mood can actually determine the results of my day. So having news on a real, even on social media, is not something that I practice on a day-to-day basis. How are you? I hope when you're listening to this, you're in a good space and place. Transition. Transition isn't easy, and my focus is on transformation. At 50, I am in the process of creating full-time self-employment for myself, and it is an aspiration to support others as they go on to that journey for themselves, also. What can I say? It's not been easy. This has not been a journey that I can say has had quick results. It has been a number of years in the making, and it has changed a great deal too. At the moment, I have my creator network. I am still building. I have sovereign. It's a creator network you'll find out a bit more about on the website I'm building. The whole idea is I will be providing some strategic support, creating a space where we can finally come together and network and build our connections, where we're not blocked from interacting with people I'd like to say from around the world. And news can be a bit skewed, can't it? I live in the village. The news I come upon in this local area is very different to the news that one would find in London. This is a notice, I think since I was a child, really. I did GCSE media studies. Even before then, I had a grandfather that purchased a number of newspapers every weekend, and his stance was you should read everything: The Sun, The Guardian, The Times, all of it. At the time I thought he was a bit obsessive. When I started to study media studies, I think that was at the time when the film Jungle Fever came out, Wesley Snipes, and the whole idea that in the UK there were billboards permitted to be shown that were banned in the US, it was intriguing. In fact, my very own service provider sent me a message asking if it was okay if they could I think personalise the adverts that come across my screen. So I suppose when I'm reading the news, when I turn on the television, I didn't really think too much of it except for a couple of weeks ago, took a bit of time out for myself, switched on the television, which I don't do as much these days, just don't have the time to, and I realized that the majority of the adverts were for pension age people. I suppose at 50 that's almost me. And the what can I say? It was very clear that the adverts were there to get my interest, let's say. The topics that I would be most interested in: real writing, preparing for your death, looking after your health. Then again, maybe it wasn't personalized to me, it could well be personalised to the location that I'm in. I do live in a small English village of 500 properties, could be just a bit about more, a little bit more now. My point is one needs to be careful as to what it is we are consuming. The local reality may not reflect the overall or global activities and reality. Now, there is an article that I'd like to talk about in this podcast. I'd like to be able to talk about a lot more articles, and with the lens of understanding what it takes to transform our lives. Transformation is something that we can choose to do. Often, life naturally encourages us to transform, it's the cycle of life. There's no getting away from it. You cannot take a ticket and fly anywhere and miss out on transformation. Wherever we are in the world, there will be opportunities to transform beginnings and endings always. Get your coffee, join me. So interestingly, the article is about a cleaner that was sacked. Apparently, they worked in the houses of parliament. I suppose where they work doesn't really matter, but it it made the headline. As it was revealed, she had secretly worked 17-hour days at two jobs for 16 years. Regardless of what anyone thinks about the decision here, I'd like to call to attention the trend that I have acknowledged since childhood or since my young years starting to work. As a black young single woman, often being encouraged to take low-paid roles, or going into jobs where, for one reason or other, promotion nor opportunities were unavailable. You're a woman, you're going to get pregnant, or the unsaid, your face doesn't fit. We see a lot of people from backgrounds, I wouldn't say disadvantaged, because the reality is there's a lot of people that came to this country that left land and property behind. And it's a strange state of affairs. They come into the country and they are seen as poor people. They came because in the country that they left behind there wasn't enough economic opportunity to live a good life, to maintain their houses, their land. I'm not saying everybody, I'm saying the majority, like my grandparents, they left land and home to come upon an invitation to rebuild the country after the war. Life has moved on, and a lot of the migrants and immigrants that come now, it is the same thing where they're looking for opportunities to make life better back home. And when you arrive or are born here, you are told if you do X, Y, Z, then life will be better for you. So someone like myself, even with all the doubters and let's just say haters, someone like myself that bothered to get a degree, make sure that she was comfortable before even trying to have children, found that there weren't the roles and responsibilities that were opening their doors to have us grow and flourish in their establishments. So many who have been committed have often done a full-time office job and maybe taken on an evening or even overnight cleaning role, often not telling anyone about it. We are very quick in society to talk about people that are out of work or as they are seen to not contribute enough to the wealth of society. And those of us that are here working quietly, trying to do the work, trying to be the upstanding citizens that apparently society wants. In my opinion, they seem to be the ones to be mostly punished for their work time and commitment. Now I don't know if this Malikut Agamodidi, I hope I'm pronouncing her name right, I don't know if her work was of a great standard. I presume it was for the what 17 hour days over 16 years that she was doing these two jobs. If her work was good and the employer was happy with her work, I really do not see the issue. Now I know that in the UK, many years ago when I was working in the NHS, they introduced this work directive where you had to agree with your employer that you wouldn't work, I think it was over 48 hours. And that's with the employer determining what your job was to be, what your salary was to be, and what any potential future progression would be. Noting that there are a number of low-paid secure jobs that do never have in mind any form of progression. When they talk about equality and diversity, often a lot of those jobs boast about multiculturalism. When you look at their structure, the majority of the people of colour, the majority of the women, it's that the triangle is as such where the diversity is often closer to the bottom of the pyramid than the top. We move around and then our communities will question why we never have enough money to pay for accommodation, childcare, health, holidays. We need to start questioning the messages that we are told. And when we're thinking about transformation, transformation always happens with our intention and without. Now is the time to start being honest with what is happening with what we are working with. So when we are raising generations to come, they understand fully the message, the hidden messages, and the loud ones. We used to have a system that geared people towards leaving education into a role, skilled or otherwise. And it was the case if your mother worked in, for example, Woolworths that doesn't exist anymore, you were more than likely going to end up in Woolworths. In fact, I do remember one of my um class, I suppose they call them classmates, someone in my class in school, she was forever turant, and when she was asked about not attending school, she was very clear. There was no need for her to be there because her mother had already identified a role for her to do as soon as she was able to leave school legally. I think in those age uh days it was 15, 16, and that is how it was then. However, when I was in school, I took a good few lessons sociology, psychology, economics. These are the subjects I found helped a lot with a number of areas of life actually, and I had good teachers. I remember around that time there were a lot of people that worked in banking and so that had invested a lot in pension stocks and so, and had lost their money, and we were told quite clearly we would be the generation that would not have a pension. I didn't quite understand it, but I took heed, and one of the things that I was told the idea of having one job for life where you would be able to get your home, have your family, and so had gone. So when I had left school, I was very open to the idea of moving from job to job if the opportunities to progress weren't available. As I got older, I became a bit more resistant to change, and even though attempts to go up the ladder, get promoted, you know, when you start these jobs, they tell you all you need to do is XYZ and the doors will open for you. I found in a couple of jobs, one in particular when I was in World Tumbridge Wells, I did all the tick boxes, and even then, the answer was no, we don't have the resources to release you. Oh, we forgot about it, that kind of thing. So when we're thinking about transformation and we're looking at where we're living, we're looking at the economy of the local area globally. What jobs really exist to help us live the lives that we think that we are moving towards? Does it have to be a job? Remember, life has changed, and where we used to be able to, as human beings, do one trade and have that support us for the rest of our lives. We are in a global marketplace. As much as social media and your employer wants to keep you trapped in this box, those that are thriving are doing business around the world. Not everybody is here to do big business, but even if you do things locally, even as a baker, there are things that you will be using in your cakes that's very reliant on international trade. Yes. So we would like to think that it's possible for us to just have a small vision, keep it small, and we will be okay. But if you want to be the master of your transformation, if you're wanting to grow in this lifetime, it serves you well to understand where your ingredients are coming from, and maybe even get ahead of how the supply chain interacts with your very own service or product delivery. There's only so much we can change. Sometimes just asking the question is enough really to start making us be aware of the opportunities that we may not have seen up until now. Hard workers, so apparently hard work doesn't pay. And from my own personal journey of the last two years, doing so many hours, I've never done so many hours in all my life to keep a roof over my head as I've done now. We're understanding that hard work is not what pays. Being strategic is something that we all need to tap into. If we don't know it, we need to learn it. And when we talk about strategy, we're not talking about setting goals, writing lists, and just expecting it to happen. Both are important. When we're talking about strategy, strategy is about looking at the overall picture. Inside and outside. We're looking at ourselves, we're looking at our strengths, we're looking at our weaknesses, we are looking at the opportunities, we are looking at the threats. Old school business strategy for ourselves that will not fail us, but we need to be open to look at it. I am seeing people that are in ill health that have worked the majority of their lives, and they have worked with this idea that eventually they will achieve their pension years and finally live the life that they've come here on earth to enjoy. One in particular hasn't, I think, four years away from retirement, they're now in hospital. Who cares how their pension will now be spent? I understand our focus is on beginnings, we get excited about births, and we get worried about endings unless it's one of our choosing. But in this life, there are things starting and ending, and often because we do not discuss cycles, we don't get in tune with cycles, we allow our commitments to determine how the beginnings and the endings will progress. So an employer offers us a role, and it's great because we need it to rent our first home, pay our bills, contribute as a member of the community of society, and they have a structure in mind in their budget, that role will never give you the opportunity financially to live the life of your dream. But you understand the compromise for now because sometimes we do need to do a few things, take a few steps, learn a few things, interact with our colleagues, get experience before we go on to the next thing. We get in and we can get comfortable, make some good friends at work actually, get into the lifestyle of leaving home, traveling to work, purchasing lunch with our colleagues, our snacks, and also, and we get into the cycle of bills are comfortably paid. Probably don't have too much towards the end of the month. Many people actually, when they get paid, there's nothing left within the first few days of payday, so you go again to make sure that you've got something coming in so you're not without. If you're paying rent, the money has gone. If you've been fortunate to have a mortgage on a level, so long as the economy is right, you're still investing in something, some kind of asset that you could potentially lose for yourself later on. Maybe the employer experiences a few financial shocks and you're let go. You move on again to this idea of security. Security is based on someone else taking the risk because all business is a risk, let's not be fooled. I had someone tell me that I should give up on a role that I do that's sales-based because it wasn't a real job, and of course, it's not a guarantee of income, which they were right about and are right about. Go for a job where you're guaranteed a salary. And yet, when I hear about Trump's America at the moment with so many people, um, I suppose is it furloughed? There's so many people at the moment in government offices that don't know if they will have jobs after the um parliament is reopened, the government is reopened. The US is just one example. Even with NHS jobs, if you remember, those were the most stable jobs you could apply for. National Health Service, a service that would always have great pensions, salaries for life. A lot has changed. Since I was at school, I heard about the NHS black hole. It hasn't had enough money to support it since I was a child. I'm 50 now. The same has happened with pensions. You know, we run away from multi-level marketing, and it's something that I do agree is not the best opportunity to move forward with. It's something I researched myself when I was doing my degree. A lot of these businesses that we work on in thinking that we have job security are built on some kind of pyramid. And what I mean by that is they invest in stocks, there's no full guarantee that there will be a return on. Life is always changing. There's no guarantee that some of these products and services that's keeping us employed will be here in five years, ten years' time. Businesses have to keep on innovating, they need to be really in the midst of their understanding as to what transformation is. They need to be ready to change all the time. Businesses are taking the risks that a lot of us as employees aren't taking, and we presume because the monthly pay is coming, this is what job security is. But actually, one decision can change the stability of any company, actually. Work hard. Now, we have all heard the term work smart, not hard. I can't believe that this woman got penalized for doing work. If she was doing anything else but work, one could almost understand. The system isn't designed for hard workers. I want you to understand. The system is not designed for hard workers. When you go to a job, and we've all done it, fresh out of school, college, university, or neither of those places, you're enthusiastic, you want to make a great impression, do the best that you can. A small percentage of those that do the best that they can will go to and get promoted. Others will often be held back as being an integral part of the department. As the company, the business unit progresses, they were never there to progress financially, structurally in that business. It doesn't matter if we go and do multiple cleaning jobs. It doesn't matter which job it is, so long as we're happy to do the job, it's safe for us, we're building our lives, aren't we? Should we not, as individuals, determine what we are prepared to do in exchange for an income to live in the society that we're in comfortably? I went to London, as I've said, had to get a tooth removed, couldn't afford to do it closer to home. And when I went to London, I was reminded that the place is just a place of workers. I've managed to go past St. Mary's Hospital, Prade Street. I used to go there as a child because I went to the school there, Northwestminster, and it was like I was just getting a flashback of my school years, and it was there was a train strike on the day. So many people of different levels going to work on the way back again. So many people in different stages and phases of transformation, school years to adulthood, cleaners, carers, business owners, business people. As a child, we used to be told to dress up. I was born and raised in Hackney, and it was a case of we'd to go to Oxford Street was like a trip out. You had to dress really well, so no one could just presume which area you came from. It was a bit like that. We'd dress up to go to Oxford Street and so we'd be taken by my mother, and in the early days, my stepfather would go to places like Harrods and so, and presume that there was this life that we were not part of, but we could be for a Saturday or so. And I remember it used to be so busy on the roads, people rushing to get to these shops. There was like this excitement and a buzz. As I aged, and I can go to these places on my own, I couldn't quite understand it. Loads of buildings, they don't look very glamorous, straight roads, and you're just walking from one end to another to another. It became more interesting when I was able to arrange to meet friends for drinks and meals and catch-ups. But the spaces I enjoyed the most was parks, Regents Park, Hydes Park, Nature. And to be honest, I wouldn't swap this village life that I'm living now, as much as I've um created a bit of a prison for myself because I'm home most of the time, just working, working, working. I would not swap this for London right now. I don't mind if I was to go to see family members, or I've always said I'd love to go to the opera, do some things. London life is as a foreigner, but to go there and live? No. So we're determining our lives, we're in our process of transformation, and we have in this life people telling us what we are worth, they're determining the salary, what jobs we're doing, even how many hours we can work, and often there's two people telling us what we can and cannot do. There's those that already have it, some of them have never worked 17 hours in that way in their life, they haven't. Some of the people that are just decide how many hours a working class person can do have never done the level of work that they're instructing that can be done or should be done. That they have never done. For example, people that have always lived in social housing, they have the security of doing so, telling people who are in private rented accommodation, paying probably three times more for less space, how they should be earning to pay to live, and how they should also have savings aside based on their income and living and lifestyle. The security that our parents had in housing has not been the same even from my own generation, and I'm 50. Looking at future generations, they are spending. I think I was reading from 1200 to 2200 for a one-bedroom place at the moment, and most of those people they're earning around, if they're fortunate, 25 to 30 grand a year. The reality, the majority of the people I know are either not earning or definitely they don't earn as much, or if they do earn as much, they're on contracts. Contracts are high earning ways for people of different backgrounds to earn. There's a certain skills, maybe a niche that they have experience in that they're able to bring to the workplace, but for some reason, employers haven't been able to find a way to truly compensate them for their work. So they continually stay on a contract until the project ends, and some of those projects can last many many years. I suppose that leads to the point of one of the messages I had in childhood, it was something that we were told, it was something that we came to understood. Our survival in a country that continually sees us as immigrants, even when we're born here, is linked to doing roles that most others do not want to do. My grandparents were invited to this country on that basis, and this is a worldwide phenomenon. This is not just a UK phenomenon. I have heard of people moving to the US, even to other islands in the Caribbean from Jamaica, Dubai, I've heard, where Jamaicans have gone and made names for themselves, building businesses and so forth that they could not do at home in Jamaica. There's something about leaving your local area, maybe even your country, where it seems as if opportunities are present. The locals don't want to do the jobs that you're able to take on and you're able to make a bit more money for yourself. But the focus, I suppose, is different. I suppose when you are in a country, you're born there, or you live there, you're thinking about wanting to integrate and live the best life in that country. But I think what we fail to realize is the pay is so low, you're never going to fully experience life as a true citizen of that country. It is often the case, I've known since childhood, people who come into the country tend to have a far better time socially and so than those that have to work, pay their rent, their bills. You capture moments of socialization, maybe with your colleagues and friends, but it's not the full experience. Not as when you travel. I think that's why a lot of us like to go on our cheap holidays where you can for a moment, a few days, a week or two, experience that life where you don't have financial worries, you can just sit back and relax and so it's hard to do here because prices have been so high for such a long time. We go to countries and in spaces doing work no one else wants to do, and those that's the opportunity to where you can make more money, those are the lucrative areas, and anyone will tell you being a cleaner privately can be really lucrative, it's not easy work. A lot of people turn their nose at it. However, we now understand if you have a job, a registered job with an employer, you have to let them know where else you might be working, otherwise, your stable job might be at risk. So I hope whoever is uh listening feels inspired. Do not be disheartened. I would still encourage you to look out for the jobs that resonate with you. It is not the case that if you do multiple cleaning jobs as it was in the old days, that you will make the riches that you expect. And it is true in the old days as a child, when I was I'm just thinking of the age, there was a time I did cleaning work in banks early morning, and there was quite a lot of people of colour that was supplementing their studies, their degrees, and so forth, putting money aside to buy property back home. These are the jobs that people don't want to do, and here we have people stepping forward and doing them. So what if they're working long hours? So what? It is what it is. Thank you for tapping into this session with me. I'd love to hear what you think about it is about survival, isn't it? Being here to acknowledge that things are always changing and in the time of transformation we have to acknowledge that there are people that will try to suppress us. But even in those times, it is okay to be open to the opportunities that you can actually progress your own life. There will be many closed doors because people don't see us as those that's worthy to be in their establishments. I almost feel as if there's some kind of a jealousy that wow, we did so much to them for them not to progress and they're still progressing. But that's a topic for another day. Thank you for joining me. Do place your comments down below. You've been with Lita, goddess of growth, today. Thank you.