6622: Disgruntled Should Grunt.

From The Washington Post…

Lucky to Have a Job? You’re Still Allowed to Grouse.

By Dan Pashman

Al is a 31-year-old consultant whose fiancee is unemployed. After a tough day at his New York office, he gets off the subway one stop early and walks the 15 minutes home, just to blow off steam before seeing her.

“She asks how my day was, but when you sit there and start talking about it and realize you hate your job that day, it’s hard to combat the idea that, yeah, I do have a job, I wasn’t part of the unfortunate many,” he says.

“You feel like you can’t really complain, but on the other hand you feel like you’re carrying the stress and the burden of keeping your mouth shut. You know [talking about your day at work] will make the other person feel worse about themselves, because they clearly have something to offer, but they’re just not getting the opportunity.”

Hundreds of thousands of layoffs across the country are affecting personal relationships, and it’s not just the laid-off who are feeling it. Many people who are working say they’ve stopped asking unemployed friends about job prospects, and they make sure not to gripe about their own jobs when those friends are around.

But refraining from the time-honored tradition of venting about work can create its own problems.

A 28-year-old writer says, “I’m really careful about complaining to my friends about anything work-related, because half of them have recently been laid off, so it’s particularly sensitive. If my mother asks me how I’m doing and I complain about an annoying thing at work, she tells me to basically suck it up because I should be happy to have a job.”

And she is happy to have a job. But, she adds, “It does make me feel stuck, because if you’re convincing yourself you’re lucky to have a job, it makes you feel like, ‘I’m lucky to have this job, but this is all I’ll ever do.’”

An attorney at a top New York law firm goes a step further, saying, “I’m actually starting to resent the fact that I’m not allowed to hate my job, I’m not allowed to have a bad day, because I’m supposed to be so thankful to have a job at all.”

In this economy, the employed are constantly reminded that they’re the lucky ones, and in some obvious ways they are. But are they entitled to feel like they’re getting screwed, too?

People who deal with “survivors”—the employees in companies left behind after layoffs—say yes.

“When organizations refer to people who lose their jobs, they refer to them as the employees who will be affected by the layoffs, and that’s my pet peeve,” says Joel Brockner, a professor at Columbia Business School who studies survivor reactions. “The implication is that people who stay won’t be affected.”

But Brockner says survivors have to deal with a lot: The threat of more layoffs hanging over their heads, an increased workload because others are gone, the loss of friends in the office, and frequently these days: pay cuts.

“There’s often a lack of focus because the stress levels go way up,” says Mary Whitcomb, a leadership consultant with Lee Hecht Harrison and a licensed psychotherapist. She says the conditions facing survivors after layoffs “fuel resentment, anger and a sense of feeling trapped, like there are no options. So there can be a lot of grousing and anxiety, a lot of negativity in an organization after people have been let go.”

These principles of survivor reaction can extend beyond an individual workplace and probably do in a time like this. If you view the whole country as one big company, USA Inc., people who still have jobs are all essentially survivors, regardless of what’s happening at their particular companies. After all, the economy has affected pretty much everyone in one way or another.

And there’s another aggravating factor. Brockner says the fairness of layoffs—who is chosen and how they are treated when they’re let go—has a huge impact on how survivors feel about their own situations. Few people would argue that the layoffs at USA Inc. have been fair. They’ve been driven primarily by economic forces beyond most peoples’ control and, so far, help has been more forthcoming for the culprits than the victims.

So it’s no surprise that the typical survivor reactions—anxiety, anger and resentment—would be found across the country. Now, recall that those with jobs are increasingly biting their tongues out of respect for those in more dire straits, and you realize there are a lot of seriously repressed people out there who are probably entitled to their own slice of the empathy pie.

The problem is, the empathy pie is shrinking.

Dan Pashman is a freelance journalist and producer at Air America Radio.