Frustration at Work: The Case for Subsidizing Career Switching

Abstract Many individuals experience frustration with their work. In some cases, this is because an individual learns that the industry in which she finds herself is simply not for her, and that, if she were starting out again, she’d choose to do something very different with her time. These are instances of what economists tend to call ‘job lock’ and situations that psychologists tend to refer to in terms of individuals being ‘stuck at work’. Our aim in this paper is to explore some of the moral dimensions of this important but neglected set of cases, in which individuals feel trapped in their current line of work. Our headline conclusion is that some of the complaints to which these concerns give rise are valid and weighty ones, and that, consequently, governments have a duty to lower the social and economic costs of switching careers. Finally, we comment explicitly on the implications of our arguments for firms, arguing that, under a range of plausible circumstances, they too have a moral duty to lower the social and economic costs of switching careers, which we can conceive of as part of the demands of corporate social responsibility.