Re: Loyalty cuts

Subject: Re: Loyalty cuts
From: Dick Margulis <margulis -at- fiam -dot- net>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2003 08:30:50 -0400




Peter wrote:


Stevenson, Rebecca wrote:

Why would anyone care? It's a job; it's not like you swore fealty. Leaving one position for another hardly constitutes a betrayal, unless you're actually violating an agreement in doing so.


What about the old fashioned concept of loyalty to an organization, for so long as they keep their commitment to you.

Have our personal values and self esteem sunk to the point where we consider ourselves just commodities available to the highest bidder. If we feel that way about ourselves, why do we bemoan that we are treated like commodities. After all you are just an employee.


Peter,

What Rebecca is speaking to is the shift between the Old Contract, where employers tried to protect (paternalistically) their employees from the vicissitudes of the market in exchange for loyalty, and the New Contract, where employees are vendors selling their services to willing buyers for a negotiated price. It really implies higher self-esteem rather than lower, but when the experience of it is divorced from the historical perspective, it can come out sounding pretty meretricious.

In any case, loyalty was a two-way street. Companies laid people off as a last resort rather than a first resort, and when they did lay people off, it was on the basis of seniority (keeping the most senior people, not firing the most senior people as is done now). So the loyalty exhibited by employees was simply rational reciprocity. If employers today want to insist on loyalty without offering anything in return, employees would be foolish to give it to them.

Dick

Dick

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References:
RE: Loyalty cuts: From: Stevenson, Rebecca
Re: Loyalty cuts: From: Peter

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