Loyalty-Then and Now

By loyalty I mean to a company or a workplace. Long time ago people use to work for a single company and retired from there (they now too but not that much). At that time the upheavals of the economy has not caught on like they are now. Another factor was that by staying with one company, they would accumulate pension and if they leave, they would have lost it. But now the meaning of loyalty has become murkier and somewhat irrelevant. This is due to one of the lasting effects of private pension funds like the 401K plans where you accumulate money and when you resign, it would not affect your 401K and you can take it to another company.

This mobility of the retirement benefits is one of the main reasons of the erosion of loyalty to a single company. Another thing that I have noticed is that the employment has become kind of “at will”, meaning you can give the company two weeks or less of a notice and the company can do the same without shedding tears on either side. Is this good or bad, you be the judge, but since the corporations see their own bottom line, people have started to see theirs and where they can find better jobs, they will move on without even thinking about what they are leaving behind. The only loyalty is towards your own and nobody else.