Hmm, as a researcher I've generally found university staff pretty helpful. I don't get the impression that it's a very secure job, either; every place I've been in the past few years has had significant staff layoffs. Now if you can get to be upper management, that's probably a nice gig with no consequences for poor performance.

But in any case, my main point isn't that no secure jobs exist, just that they're less common and there's no real clear path to them, whereas there used to be multiple clear paths to one, in both blue-collar and white-collar directions.