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.”
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.