How loyal should you be?
It's not the top priority when the world is on fire
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Morning, Colleague!
Didn’t think you’d appreciate a rant about self-employment on a Bank Holiday, so here it is a week later instead.
This month I've been thinking a lot about loyalty. It's one of those concepts that people tend to be resolutely positive about: 'I am a loyal friend', etc. But is it as black and white as all that? For one thing, blanket loyalty doesn't mean putting up with poor or thoughtless behaviour from anyone. Sure, it can mean trying to give people the benefit of the doubt (which we should all endeavour to do in general) but it doesn't mean blindly accepting whatever shit people throw at you.
The 'loyal employee' was once a concept that made total sense. Yesterday I was walking to the post office past some sweet terrace houses, and noticed they all had little engravings on the front with names like 'Cardigan Cottages', and the date they were built, 1858. I'm no historian, but I am fairly certain they were for housing workers (possibly for the area's burgeoning brick industry). In this particularly chaotic moment of history, it struck me as one of those 'you have to laugh or you'd cry' concepts - the idea that an employer owed his workers a comfortable home to support their families, as well as a salary. It comes to something when we start romanticising Victorian factory owners as 'good guys', but clearly we're a long way from the days when most employers gave two hoots about whether you could afford a place to raise your kids or not.
Last week half of the team from one of my old jobs (my happiest employment experience) were made redundant. It really made me sad, both for them all as individuals (although I know they will ace whatever they go on to do) and for my memories of working there and being part of such a nice team. I suppose it's hard to blame the company entirely, when obviously magazine sales are falling rapidly, and the pandemic affected advert sales, etc. But equally it was the final nail in the coffin for the feeling I've carried for my whole career: there is absolutely no point in being loyal to a company.
Where once you might have entered a workplace at the bottom, and worked your way up to the corner office and the gold carriage clock at retirement, we're now in some weird recession-led Wild West, and left fighting over scraps.
I've always been made to feel somehow ungrateful, or like I'm 'rocking the boat' by craving more than my former 9 - 5s (for example, I have always freelanced on the side of my jobs to help bolster my income, contacts and CV - plus for the sheer pleasure of writing what I wanted to write). I've spoken about this before, in All The Jobs I've Loathed Before, so I won't go on about it too much here, but essentially, in this day and age, I feel that companies deserve only this: you will do a good as job as possible on the piece of work agreed, and no more. (In turn, I suppose they only owe you: providing you the tools you need to do that piece of work, and paying you as agreed...although we all know that the 'payment on time' part of that statement is often a pipe dream.)
As I've said before in my ode to half-arsing: be professional, be responsible, and if you feel inclined, be fun to work with too. It's not about being flakey, or constantly dissatisfied, it's a matter of protecting your feelings (and income) by being realistic in what you expect from employers.
Companies can no longer afford to be 'loyal' to their employees (let alone freelance staff), so I suppose we have to learn not to expect it, however galling that can feel. Of course I'm not saying we need to make rash decisions, or never work with the same people more than once. Constant hustling is exhausting, and I also feel the lure of regular work - there's nothing wrong with that. Who hasn't woken up and occasionally longed for a piece of easy 'do it in your sleep' work, for a decent wage? And those roles do exist, many of which are a delight. All I'm saying is, don't turn down other opportunities out of a sense of loyalty. Make the best decision for you, at this time. Your ultimate loyalty is owed to you, and the people you love.
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