It should not be news to anyone that there is a drought of loyalty between employers and employees. Employees don’t care about their employer, and while employers expect dedication and loyalty from their employees, they offer none in return.
At the root of the current shortage is the collapse of a social contract: workers will give their all to their employers if they are, in return, taken care of—given pensions, benefits, the promise of promotion, and humane working conditions (not “humane” as in spaces that pose no danger, but a higher sense of “humane” whereby they treat you like a person and partner rather than a cog). Yet the substance of these promises has slowly been drained over the last half century. In their pursuit of the bottom line, companies have dropped—sometimes nefariously, sometimes absent-mindedly—those little securities that the vast majority of workers expected. And while I think employers, those inherently with more power, have been the source of this shift, employees have by no means been patient in their withdrawal from the contract. Workers have never been overly loyal to their employers (if someone offered substantially more pay, they had no problem jumping ship), but beginning with Generation X, at the first sign of the contract not being met, what little loyalty there was quickly disappeared. And more importantly, their willingness to put in effort, to “go above and beyond,” disappeared as well.
Now, I’m not terribly interested in adding to this particular discussion, the specific economic and social implications of this collapse—it’s been written about and commented on by hundreds. Rather, I want to point our attention to how this all affects loyalty and ambition broadly.
It is not only in our work where we see a lack of virtue, but also in our lives with the community (and zooming out, with one’s nation), with friends, and with family. Currently, we are profoundly confused as to what loyalty means in those contexts. Patriotism exists only at the extremes of abhorrent vice or premier virtue, dividable among political lines; loyalty to friends is only understandable in terms of not “ratting” on someone; and family members are seen as relationships open to revision. And much the same can be said for something like ambition (or in terms of classic virtue, magnanimity)—it is either misunderstood or totally absent in modern contexts. We are, most of us, content with our current levels achievement or skills or dispositions or character—or at least not willing to put in the effort to change them.
There is clearly a connection between these problems, between our vices at work and those in the rest of our lives. And if I had to guess, I’d say that the latter likely produce the former—our failings in our basic relationships pour over into our failings on the job. Yet, I suspect that addressing our problems at work may actually be the avenue for addressing them at home.
In fact, I want to suggest that we might think of our jobs as something like training wheels, that our loyalty to employers (or for the rich, their loyalty to their employees) acts as a sort of playground for learning loyalty in a context with lower stakes. This can seem counterintuitive since our work often provides a sense of identity and, what is more, our means for survival. But the social demands that a job requires are only of secondary importance to those demanded by our lives with the community, with friends, and with family. If we can learn the skills of a perfunctory loyalty in the controlled environment of the workplace, then we begin to set ourselves up for the greater demands of loyalty in our true relationships. Likewise, if we can demonstrate ambition in the job, then we can demonstrate ambition in life.
Perhaps I have this backwards, and rather, we must start by learning loyalty with friends and with family. But it seems to me that those realities (especially friendships) are far more complex. There are guardrails in the world of business—there are very clear paths forward and rarely circumstances requiring whistleblowing. At the very least, it seems like a more manageable goal, one that if we can address it, it gives me hope for the future of society.