corporate mainstays from Coinbase to Oracle to Meta layoff thousands. The Oracle example in particular makes a mockery of this question, as thousands of employees were terminated by a mass-firing email with no in-person explanation, some of them after decades of loyalty to the company.
Loyalty to one’ s employer used to mean something in the corporate world. What cost employees decades of work to build, toxic cultures now lead employers to disregard it entirely when convenient. When security and safety in the job field is threatened and loyalty no longer being rewarded, when major corporations start sharpening the axe, safety is far from anyone’ s minds.
“ Do I respect those I work for and their intentions?”
This question has implications spanning from environmental trustworthiness to the way
wages are handled to how high-level executives are treated. It can be hard to answer all the questions that come from this one, but as in the aforementioned case of Oracle’ s mass layoffs, its CEO getting an additional $ 26 million in stock immediately after the layoffs does little to affirm good intentions to employees who remain. As in the example of UnitedHealthcare, reports of its record-high insurance claim denials certainly cast a shadow over the public’ s perception of its intentions, and unfortunately, we saw the tragic outcome of that perception.
“ Can I trust them?”
In a highly-polarized workplace market, organizations are prioritizing profits above all else, including culture, loyalty and fairness. Perhaps this is too harsh of an assessment, but when incidents keep happening, such as an Amazon worker dying during his shift and coworkers reportedly being told to keep working, it’ s hard to sort through the noise.
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