In the two years I’ve been writing about Americans’ changing relationship to work, there’s one theme that’s come up over and over again: loyalty. Whether my stories are about quiet quitting, or job-hopping, or leveraging a job offer from a competitor to force your boss to give you a raise, readers seem to divide into two groups. On one side are the bosses and tenured employees, the boomers and Gen Xers. Kids these days, they gripe. Do they have no loyalty? On the other side are the younger rank-and-file employees, the millennials and Gen Zers, who feel equally aggrieved. Why should I be loyal to my company when my company isn’t loyal to me?
I knew it would happen again the other month, when I was reporting on white-collar workers who secretly juggle multiple full-time jobs. Overemployment, as the phenomenon is known, violates society’s implicit norms of loyalty to one’s employer more flagrantly than anything else I’ve encountered. But when I asked these overemployed professionals whether they felt bad that they were essentially cheating on their bosses, they were unapologetic. “My parents told me, ‘Don’t switch companies, grow in one company, be loyal to one company, and they’ll be loyal to you,’” one guy told me. “That may have been true in their days, but it definitely isn’t today anymore.”
- Pay me
- Leave me the fuck alone
Do these adequately and I will provide labor in due proportion. Otherwise, fuck off.
I really don’t understand why we should feel loyalty to a company. They treat workers as resources to be exploited. And sometimes they call them family, only to kick them out when they need higher profits. Lols.
Companies used to offer pensions to employees, and time served meant a better reward for retirement. The pension idea eroded over the years but the mindset remained.
Not just that… The world around the worker changed in other significant ways. Thirty years ago you were off the clock you were virtually inexcessable. Damn near nobody had cell phones so there was no panicked call to come back as you are on your drive home. Jobs that had pagers were basically the sort that were life or death and everything else could wait. It was perfectly normal for a call to go to an answering machine because the assumption was “what can you do, they probably are out somewhere.”
The expectations of productivity gains made by making the worker accessible at all hours, calling them in for mandatory shifts last second at any moment or to answer job related questions on demand as a feature of employment takes a fucking toll. Jobs, even ones at the rock bottom don’t have natural boundries anymore. The corporate culture has infringed on and destroyed free time because young people are expected to be plugged in where older gens are cut some slack. Just not really understanding your phone and having the assumed habit of leaving it at home is an unwitting defense mechanism that does not extend to the young. In my industry not answering your electronic tether is a cardinal sin. I couldn’t leave this thing at home if I wanted to.
Which is why I scold myself for so much as thinkng about work off hours. I tell my supervisor as much when they ask if I’ve had time to think about a solution to a technical issue.
They’re very A type and I enjoy how much my disdain for the modern business ethos bothers them.
It even goes beyond just that companies used to be about creating value for customers but with all the mergers and what I like to call finance fuckery like airlines being more banks that happen to own planes.
Companies selling things at a lost to drive out competitors and their revenue mostly comes from investors waiting for the company becomes a defacto monopoly and they then can raise prices that blow up the stock. Offload successful business with so much debt that they close at no fault of their own.
Loyalty. What a fucking joke.
You know what loyalty gets ya ? Exploited.
No company cares if you can eat or afford rent. Their bottom line is where everything stops. End of story.
I’ve watched my parents and other generations put in 50 years and get a pin when they leave.
Fuck your loyalty. Job hop often and keep moving forward. If you don’t you basically take a pay every year. No company is matching inflation.
Fuck em. They lose no sleep. Neither should you.
Leave emotion at the door. Work is brutal
Your parents got more than we ever will. We’ll work until we’re physically broken and will be lucky to die in a cardboard box, let alone receive a pin to barter for a crust of bread with.
Oh I know. And I have explicitly moaned on about it. They don’t understand. They don’t need to rent. They are mortgage free and just don’t understand the world anymore. No point on me banging on about it.
Those disgruntled people in this thread. I suggest you read the article. The first thing it talks about is how companies started outsourcing and treating employees as replaceable, and employees were slow to respond at first, so companies just kept pushing until they finally fucked around enough to find out that they caused this mess.
It’s a pretty good article, and argues that the employers need to step up and start showing real leadership, instead of chasing the lowest contract, and single quarter vision.
I agree that it’s a good article, but I find it highly unlikely that businesses will do those things. Private companies, maybe. But public companies need to keep the line going up, so they will always be short-sighted. It’s why I don’t want to work for public companies in the first place.
We need to put our money into ethical, sustainability-focused activist funds that can force the public corps’ to institute reforms.
GenX doesn’t give a fuck about loyalty either, and hasn’t since the 80s.
Why would they, Gen X grew up with both parents working jobs instead of the previous generations when one income was enough to support a family.
Society has been letting each following generation down even more than the previous. The boomers fucked everyone when they pulled the ladder up behind them.
That’s what it comes down to: You are expected to have loyalty to your employer, but your employer has 0 loyalty to you. If you want me to break my back for a single company, it needs to do right by its employers first.
It’s worse than that. If I show loyalty they’ll actively screw me over for it. Staying in one job ensures my pay stagnates compared to market value.
We need unions that span many companies to which workers can join for the long term. That is the kind of organization to be loyal to for the long term.
Even worse, during the Great Resignation, employers effectively penalized employees for their loyalty, offering sky-high salaries to attract job candidates while neglecting their existing staff. As I reported in 2022, veteran employees received salaries that were 7% lower, on average, than new hires.
The biggest raise I’ve ever gotten in my 20 year career was 10%. The smallest increase in salary from switching jobs was 20%, and that’s an outlier. Staying in one job just isn’t worth it anymore.
His boss apologized, telling him that the layoffs had nothing to do with him. It was just business.
And there’s the problem. Employers are businesses, and no matter how loyal your boss is to you and vice versa, some beancounter will axe your job without a second thought. “Just business” is anathema to loyalty.
I knew it would happen again the other month, when I was reporting on white-collar workers who secretly juggle multiple full-time jobs. Overemployment, as the phenomenon is known, violates society’s implicit norms of loyalty to one’s employer more flagrantly than anything else I’ve encountered. But when I asked these overemployed professionals whether they felt bad that they were essentially cheating on their bosses…
What the fucking fuck? This guy actually articulated this thought as if it were rational?
Am I living in Crazyworld?
Narrator: He was.
This is an excellent article. I work hard for my boss because my boss is good to me. I actively look for stuff to do because I give a shit about him and the people I work with. That is not the case when my employer treats me like a replaceable asset instead of a person.
I really like my job. However, the company and I are a simplified relationship. They pay me, I do work. If they stopped paying, I would stop working.
I am loyal to the people and they to me. I wouldn’t leave them with no/low notice because that is a dick move. This is not entirely altruistic, of course, as my best chance for a new job are the people I know.
I lay this at the feet of financialization. Companies decided that their _share_holders were the only _stake_holders that mattered. If all you care about is “line go up” it’s much easier to treat employees as fungible. But you can’t “line go up” forever: the planet’s resources are finite. One of those resources is goodwill and “line go up” has been burning it for fifty years.
Yes, at some point the goal should be to simply “keep going” rather than to always “keep going up”.
Ive never even met my “boss”.
I’m a boomer in late-career and I absolutely agree with this. Companies might put on airs about “corporate culture” and “join our family” - with very rare exception, it’s complete bullshit. You’re a disposable replaceable asset, nothing more. My advice: find a job you like that you are good at, and where you like your boss (hugely important IMO), give the job what it needs, and nothing more. Keep the rest of the time for your life, hobbies, family, J2, or whatever.
