Looking for some temporary stability, the chance to get back to secure paycheques for the first time since I left the federal government in 2012, and the ability to repair the countless things that have been worn down and damaged during the PhD — I am casting a net wide for jobs I can start at soon.
Based on my own experiences and discussions with others, however, I am excluding two fields which might seem among the most obvious for me: the academic precariat and the environmental NGO precariat. I know plenty of people caught up in the low pay, overwork, and stress of postdoc positions, lecturing, adjunct professorships, and similar. The common theme seems to be coldhearted skinflint employers, intolerable working conditions, and jobs where you spend half your time fundraising for the grants to pay your own salary. I feel much the same about the eNGO sector, which is even more poorly paid and insecure, even more a game of always working to win the grant to pay your salary for the next month of grant applications, and a social culture that broadly demands ideological conformity to a theory of change and set of objectives that I do not see as very likely to produce the public policy wins sought. (Believing this, or at least pointing it out, tends to risk making one unemployable in the sector.)
I feel like the common pattern in both the junior academic and the eNGO world is to demand that employees give more than they can sustainably, provide them less material and moral support than they need to keep going long term, and then condemn them for insufficient loyalty when this combination pushes them out into other employment. I suspect I can get more done on the environmental file by getting a decent job that provides genuine time off and working as a volunteer for groups that seem to have a sound strategy.
