HR has a new phrase for an old problem. “Job hugging.” People clinging to roles they’ve mentally checked out of, staying put instead of moving on.

The framing, as usual, locates the problem in the worker. They’re disengaged. They’re risk-averse. They’re hugging the job out of fear. The implied fix is to get inside their psychology and shake them loose.

Here’s another reading. People aren’t hugging their jobs. They’re surveying the alternatives and finding nothing better.

Look at what’s actually around them. Real wages that have barely moved in over a decade. Rent and mortgage costs that punish any gap in income. A labour market where the “next step” often means more responsibility for the same pay, or a sideways move into somewhere just as precarious. Why would anyone leap?

Staying isn’t irrational. It’s an accurate read of the conditions. When the ground outside is unstable, you hold on to the ledge you’ve got. That’s not a psychological flaw. It’s a survival response to an economy that has made movement expensive and risky.

What HR calls disengagement is often something simpler. People doing the job, drawing the pay, and refusing to give the discretionary extra that the workplace did nothing to earn. They turn up. They deliver. They don’t pour themselves into a system that would replace them within the quarter if the numbers required it.

We saw the same pattern named two different ways by the same government this spring. One, Keep Britain Working, treated the labour market as basically healthy, just needing people nudged into more activity. Another, weeks later, found that seven in ten workers were experiencing measurable harm at work, with mental health the most common harm of all. Same workforce. One story blames the worker. The other looks at the conditions.

“Job hugging” is the corporate version of the same sleight of hand. It takes a rational response to a broken deal and renames it as a personality defect.

If you want people to move with confidence, the answer isn’t to diagnose their fear. It’s to build a labour market where moving doesn’t mean gambling their housing, their health cover, their stability. Make the next step safe and people will take it.

Until then, holding on isn’t fear. It’s the most sensible thing they can do, and dressing it up as a mindset problem just lets the conditions off the hook.