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.”
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.