I think in some ways, it has taken me a while to internalize how much BS there is surrounding capitalist narratives about jobs and job security.

As far as I can tell, scarcity of highly specialized labor for highly specialized roles is about the only “organic” means of job security under capitalism. But this is also irrelevant for the majority of the working class. If most people had highly specialized skills that fit into highly specialized roles, those roles that have a scarcity of workers trying to fill the position would cease to have said scarcity and the organic, solo bargaining power of the worker would fall apart.

So labor organizing (such as unions, when there is not yet a revolution) and state regulations (which organized labor has to push for - the capitalists aren’t going to do it out of the kindness of their hearts) are the main source of job security existing at all under capitalism.

Merit is certainly not job security, nor anything like a guarantee of a job; that’s one of the lies. I think what happens here is merit is conflated with the scarcity phenomenon; the highly specialized laborer is also probably skilled at what they do for it to be such a rare thing. But this does not mean they necessarily have more bargaining power because of merit. The real source of the “organic” bargaining power is the scarcity and the more who train to be able to benefit from it, the less who actually can.