Company Loyalty

[JiNX-01]

Judge Alba wrote:

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I tried being loyal to the company I work at for the past 21 years only to find out that three people doing the same job as me have started on 25% more then me and are due a rise end of august. reason I aint getting a rise?

they claim I am on a seperate pay line which means my pay has been capped for the next three years and the old timers will be told in writing end of the month

Old timers?
Or long-term employees?

If it's the former, you might have an age discrimination case.

[Serial thread killer]

I do the best Job I can do, but as they are quite happy for me to be crippled in a few years time simply because they will not carry out a simple repair to a machine. I would not give it a moments thought if someone offered me another job,I would be off like a shot.

[macloudt]

Nerdius Maximus wrote:

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This. Anyone who blindly trusts that a big corporation is looking out for his best interests is a fool.

Agreed, though an exception may be a larger company which is in private hands, such as the one my father worked for. Of course, when he was hired in the early 1960s this company could still limit their work force to only Roman Catholics, so it really was a different era. My dad worked for them for almost 30 years until his retirement.

I think of myself as loyal to my job rather than to my employer, which is the county council, especially due to the nature of my job. However with all the public spending cuts the new UK government is planning to do I don't know how much longer I'll have this job. The irony is that the services we provide will be needed more than ever.

[Holdfast]

A company is there to make money. Anything they do to make you happy working for them is not done out of altruism, but to convince you to stay working for them for as they regard you as an asset.

In that context, loyalty to your employer certainly has a role to play. By being loyal to a company you preserve your perks, salary, opportunities, etc, etc. But it is not the same sort of loyalty you might show someone/something that you do not have a monetary relationship with. I leave it to another thread to debate whether altruistic loyalty is ever possible. But company loyalty is quite clearly bought loyalty, similar to what you might expect from a mercenary to his boss, and so always susceptibility to a cost-benefit financial calculus. To behave any other way towards your employer is I think to do yourself a disservice and leave yourself open to exploitation.

I have only two more working days of being directly employed by an organisation. The calculus no longer added up in favour of staying in the job.

[Robert Maxwell]

I was loyal to my last employer. Not a mistake I will make again. They sold us a bunch of crap about how they were going to "invest in the employees" and then they shitcanned a third of the company.

I like the job I have now. I like (some of) the people I work with. The guys running the place are sharp. But they've also been changing things around, let some people go, etc. I'll stay with this job until I find something I like better or I think this place is going downhill. Last time, I didn't jump ship while the company was in dire straits. If that happens here--if the company has a bad year or a run of bad quarters--I will ditch as fast as I can rather than wait for the ax to fall.

[Cicero]

Rii wrote:

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Loyalty is antithetical to capitalism.

I disagree. I think it's only antithetical to shortsighted capitalism. Research regularly bears out the benefits of developing long-term relationships between employer and employees. Well-trained employees who feel ownership of their situation produce better results for their employer; only in a world concerned with short-term profits, rather than sustainable profits over years and decades, are long-term employees a hindrance.

[J. Allen]

Kestra wrote:

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Everyone's ultimately going to do what is best for them, and take care of themselves. Company loyalty is a nice idea and you shouldn't intentionally try to screw over your company, but the reality is that you need to look after your own interests because o one else is going to. There are some businesses out there that will go out of their way to help their employees, but blind trust in something like that is too big of a risk and things could change at any moment.

True, and the longer I try to get a job, the more I see desperation replacing any type of loyalty in a company. People know they can be replaced at the drop of a hat.

In general, then, it looks like company loyalty (as we know it or knew it) is a thing of the past, then. Without indulging in a rose colored glasses view of the past, it was often that people worked for the same company their whole lives, and retired from there. I do agree with Naira, in that small businesses can earn loyalty because they are small enough to care (this was echoed by others as well). Like Robert, I was loyal to the company. I wanted them to succeed. At the same time I wanted them to be fair to the employees, and for a while they were, but then toward the end, they just started hemorrhaging employees, and started bringing in new employees at a severely cut rate. We went from a full time badged/temp ratio of 90/10 at the start, to a ratio of 40/60, and by the time I left, 80/20. From what I am told by the few friends who still work there, it's 90/10. Temps do not receive benefits, and technically they don't actually work for Dell.

One other note, to gturner, actually, Dell kept quite a large amount of inventory. I worked in warranty, and the largest Dell affiliated warehouse (Dell doesn't own any property in the United States) in North America at the time. We were actually expanding to take on new inventory, while also leasing inventory for Walmart toward the last couple of months there.

[Robert Maxwell]

Cicero wrote:

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I disagree. I think it's only antithetical to shortsighted capitalism. Research regularly bears out the benefits of developing long-term relationships between employer and employees. Well-trained employees who feel ownership of their situation produce better results for their employer; only in a world concerned with short-term profits, rather than sustainable profits over years and decades, are long-term employees a hindrance.

Sorry, but I worked for a company that developed long-term relationships with its employees. You wanna know how much they counted for when the chips were down? Fucking squat. Dozens of people who'd been with this company for 20+ years--good people, highly skilled and competent--shown the door because incompetent management ran the company into the ground.

[Small White Car]

Naira wrote:

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I believe that company "loyalty" can only exist in small businesses. When it comes to a large corporation, the numbers are more important than the people.

Not always. My company has over 20,000 employees and hasn't had any lay-offs for over 30 years.

And it's not because times have been perfect since then. There have been bad years but they'd rather eat the salary costs in the short term than have to re-train people later on who would be much less experienced.

It's part of the company culture. ALL of our upper-level managers rose up through the ranks from low-level jobs. Our CEO started in the mail room 50 years ago. That sounds cliché but probably only in Hollywood. It's rarely the norm in the real corporate world. We really don't hire high-priced VPs or CEOs away from other companies. They come from within.

And having upper management with that background is a very powerful thing. It would take a disaster that I can't even imagine for them to start firing people. It's just not how they see things.

[Nerdius Maximus]

Holdfast wrote:

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A company is there to make money. Anything they do to make you happy working for them is not done out of altruism, but to convince you to stay working for them for as they regard you as an asset.

In that context, loyalty to your employer certainly has a role to play. By being loyal to a company you preserve your perks, salary, opportunities, etc, etc. But it is not the same sort of loyalty you might show someone/something that you do not have a monetary relationship with. I leave it to another thread to debate whether altruistic loyalty is ever possible. But company loyalty is quite clearly bought loyalty, similar to what you might expect from a mercenary to his boss, and so always susceptibility to a cost-benefit financial calculus. To behave any other way towards your employer is I think to do yourself a disservice and leave yourself open to exploitation.

I have only two more working days of being directly employed by an organisation. The calculus no longer added up in favour of staying in the job.

Yeah, they exist to make money, but what they never seem to realize is that they won't be making money for long if they continue to piss everybody off. It's in their best interests to have employees who are somewhat happy. In the short-term, having a high turnover rate will save them some money, sure, but in the long run, they're missing out on the level of experience that you just can't get when you're hiring new people every six months to a year. They could have had "loyal" people working for them, busting their asses, but instead they'll end up with a bunch of people who don't give a shit because they know it's only a temporary thing. And then their company will die.

[Nerdius Maximus]

Small White Car wrote:

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Not always. My company has over 20,000 employees and hasn't had any lay-offs for over 30 years.

And it's not because times have been perfect since then. There have been bad years but they'd rather eat the salary costs in the short term than have to re-train people later on who would be much less experienced.

It's part of the company culture. ALL of our upper-level managers rose up through the ranks from low-level jobs. Our CEO started in the mail room 50 years ago. That sounds cliché but probably only in Hollywood. It's rarely the norm in the real corporate world. We really don't hire high-priced VPs or CEOs away from other companies. They come from within.

And having upper management with that background is a very powerful thing. It would take a disaster that I can't even imagine for them to start firing people. It's just not how they see things.

Yeah, I think things work much better when management has actually performed a similar job to the employees he manages.

[SicOne]

My loyalty to my company is so great that I specified my organ donor information on the back of my driver's license to indicate that senior execs of my corporation get first-choice. As I don't drink or smoke, my organs should be cherry!

Seriously, though...I do consider myself loyal to my company. It is a good line of work that I am in and I enjoy it greatly and it has allowed me to provide for my family in a way I never dreamed possible as a college dropout, and we have a decent pension plan and great benefits. I would like to keep that gravy train on the rails, so that also has a lot to do with "company loyalty", as it were.

Regarding personal loyalty within the company, I would consider myself more loyal to people who treat me with a little respect and human dignity, but that's just human nature to work harder for someone who treats you well than someone who sees you as disposable as a #2 pencil.

I used to be somewhat dissapointed in my early (and more naive) years with my company that they did not really reward hard work and ingenuity and innovation, but nowadays I am content that my only direct feedback from my employer come$ twice a month. If they were interested in my opinion on how to run operations more intelligently than those of us in the field perceive them, I figure they would ask us. They don't, so I just follow my instructions and do the best I can with what they give me to work with. I'm content.

[judge alba]

JiNX-01 wrote:

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Old timers?
Or long-term employees?

If it's the former, you might have an age discrimination case.

just the ones that have been working ten years plus, which equals to about 25 out of 200 employees

[Hermiod]

Sarek of Vulcan wrote:

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I was just thinking about the state of our economy, how many corporations are treating their employees, the need for absolute profit over the well-being of the employee (and the customer as well), and I was wondering, does company loyalty still exist? Are any of you loyal to your business

As of this Sunday coming I will have been with my current employer for ten years.

and if so, what keeps you loyal?

One thing and one thing only - they accommodate my unusual working hours.

[John Clark]

I guess I've been fairly loyal to the company in that I've been with them for about twenty years.

It's down to them being ok with the hours I want to work (Not that unusual, but I can finish early) good wages and being a fairly easy commute.

I also have mostly decent colleagues.