'Job hugging' isn't fear. It's a rational read of a broken deal.

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

As usual, it puts the problem in the worker. They’re disengaged. They’re scared of risk. They’re hugging the job out of fear. So the fix is to get inside their heads and shake them loose.

They’ve looked at what else is out there

I read it differently. People aren’t hugging their jobs. They’ve looked at what else is out there and found nothing better.

Look at what’s around them. Real pay that took until 2024 to get back to where it was in 2008, according to the Resolution Foundation. 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 insecure. Why would anyone jump?

Staying makes sense when the alternatives aren’t any better.

When everything outside looks shaky, you hold on to what you’ve got. That’s not a flaw in the person. It’s a reasonable response to an economy that has made moving on a gamble.

Mark Fisher called the mood underneath this capitalist realism: the sense that there is no alternative, that this is simply how things are and always will be. When every option on offer comes with the same insecurity, staying where you are is common sense.

What HR calls disengagement is often something simpler. People doing the job, taking the pay, and refusing to do more than they’re paid for when their employer has done nothing to earn it. They turn up. They deliver. They don’t pour themselves into a place that would replace them within the quarter if the numbers called for it.

Same workforce, two stories

Two government-commissioned reports looked at the same workforce six months apart. Keep Britain Working, in November 2025, treated the labour market as basically healthy, with people needing a nudge back into activity. Working Lives, in May 2026, found that seven in ten workers had experienced at least one of eight main problems at work, from breaches of their legal rights to bullying. The most common was work harming their mental health. One story blames the worker. The other looks at the conditions.

“Job hugging” does the same thing in HR language. It takes a sensible response to a broken deal and turns it into a personality defect.

None of this is a law of nature

Richard Murphy has argued for years that wages, rents and insecure work are the result of political decisions, and that those decisions can be made differently.

If you want people to move jobs 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 people can do, and calling it a mindset problem just lets employers and government off the hook.