Leaving aside obvious things like tenured professorships and military service.
Tenure doesn’t do you much good if the institution offering it to you shuts down, as a lot of professors are finding out these days.
HVAC - technician?
Unemployment office worker.
Similarly, public school teaching used to be considered fairly recession-proof, but the current conditions of state budgets (e.g. California’s) is causing layoffs in many school districts.
Ed
Stores that sell food are doing very well. People gotta eat.
Politician.
The profession is recession proof, if not the individual.
Any basic service, such as repair plumber, garbage collector, mail delivery person etc. People don’t cut back on these things…
I have friends who are tradesmen (carpenter, painter, plumber) who do side-work and they tell me their day jobs aren’t doing so hot, their side work is doing great. People are fixing up their homes instead of looking for new ones.
My job is pretty damn recession-proof. I work in debt counseling.
Are health-related services relatively immune to economic conditions?
NPR had an interview the other day with an attorney who represents banks in foreclosures. He was fully employed + 1. Actually, both sides of that equation are probably pretty recession proof.
I have read multiple times that women’s cosmetics is fairly recession proof as an industry. Maybe guys can’t trade up to a trophy wife so they pretty up the current one? Actually, the explanation was more along the lines of women treating themselves to small luxuries (lipstick) rather than large ones (shoes).
My job is also pretty damn recession-proof. I prepare bankruptcies for a law firm.
Not really…
When people get laid off, they loose insurance. So they don’t fix the sorts of things they’d fix if they had insurance. Knees go unfixed, infertility doesn’t get taken care of. Even simple things like throat swaps - a $10 office copay with insurance is $70 without insurance and becomes “lets see if this clears up on its own.”
My sister works for a small hospital and hours have been cut - functionally for this reason.
Criminality.
If you’re really successful, you’ll thrive. If not, you’ll at least get a place to stay, with three meals a day.
Theres a difference between jobs which are recession-proof and jobs which are counter-cyclical. Being a foreclosure agent is great until the housing market picks up again and you’re out of a job.
Not only that, but even if your department is closed, tenure is of no value. My university is likely to close whole departments soon, and there will be full professors getting pink slips (so to speak.) Hopefully not, but rumors abound, and it seems pretty likely. Some really highly-valued professors might get transferred to other departments, but many will be laid off, almost certainly.
Dad became a sewage treatment operator because, “folks can cut back on how much they eat, but everybody’s got to flush.”
Hospital nursing is pretty good. Sure, there are people who won’t go to the doctor for relatively minor problems, but a lot of these people get sicker and wind up in the ER rather than just…die. Elective surgeries like LASIK (my husband’s in a laser eye surgery office) are doing really badly, but people still get cancer, heart disease, heart failure, liver failure, etc. And they need treatment of some sort, even if they can’t afford it.
Some hospitals have laid off nurses in our area, though, and that really sucks. Still, I’m a new graduate RN, and I just had a job offer and two other interviews (offers pending). If I can get a job in nursing, anyone can.
I recently had some legal issues and based on the difficulty I had getting just getting a lawyer to discuss it with me tells me that they must be very busy.