[quote=scaredyclassic]What are the ethical duties an employee has to her employer today?
Is it to work as hard as possible during work hours? Is it to accomplish as much as possible for the employer? Or is it just to not actively try to harm the employer while meeting minimum standards?
Given the extraordinary lack of any hint of any loyalty toward workers nowadays, it feels like the duty to work as diligently as possible is not an ethical imperative.
It is an interesting sociological question.[/quote]
The worker employer relationship these days is more like mercenary and an armed group , hired to achieve a goal. Once that goal is accomplished and paid for, its time to move on to the next thing, even if that next thing is to be on the opposing team….Reducing and eliminating some of those non+compete clauses by the Biden administration will help with that too, and give workers a leg up over employers…
…a for profit company that cant meet its quarter.often times will layoff people to keep its EPS… or a CEO/board will decide to sell the company to a say a SPAC or private equity firm, who in turn just want to cut cost by replacing US worker with cheaper overseas worker (or by moving jobs from CA to cheaper areas like FL or TX) irrespective of how loyal and dedicated they were…
…how “loyal” could you reasonably expect workers to be once the cards tilt in their favor?
The days of an employee and employer loyalty pledge has long past once employers stopped offering a long term pension commitment and made most average run-of+mill workerbe adopt an at-will employment agreement and an arbitration agreement as condition of employment, which an average worker not in senior management is in no position to negotiate prior to joining..those are there for a reason, to protect the company…not you…
If in doubt, ask all the Broadcom employees that lost their jobs when Avago took over and chopped and sold the company into pieces. it was great for people like me negotiated a heavy RSU stock grant, but for those engineers who worked 10+years at the same company collecting COLA raises who were suddenly terminated due to no fault of their own, many couldnt find jobs for several years thereafter or had to move from development to QA role or had to relocate out of SD because that’s all people were willing to give them, since (1 )they had no other work experience beside 1 company that narrowly pigeonholed their skills, and (2) their age set in and were compared to their 20something peers….poof…terminated due to M&A business transaction…. and trying to find a job along with hundreds of your other peers at the same time…
…or ask some of my good mobile engineers that use to work at Angie’s but left.. given how poorly the private equity firm treated them after they bought the company, theh had a boatload of stories to tell…Or ask the folks at Websense, who for some time when they were acquired by a PE firm, were either forced to relocate to TX and take a pay cut or get laid off..(uts better now they were bought by Northrop Grunman I think and now have presence again in SD as Centerpoint)
The old expectation of employee loyalty would be naive at best, since an employer has no loyalty to taking care of its employees. Your job safety is only guaranteed to the point that your immediate manager likes you AND he/she is still employed. New boss because old boss was laidoff? all bets are off.
