There’s something problematic that underlies this that we as a society should all be worried about. It’s been a long time since you could really trust a corporation to be honest with you or to take care of you, maybe never. But you could at least trust the people you worked with and for to be good humans and do the right thing even if it wasn’t the profitable thing. It seems like those days may be gone, where human decisions still had room inside a company that is squeezing everyone for profit.  The human decency is gone from work. The managers that fought for their people have hung up their gloves. Anyone can be laid off, remotely, with no consideration for what it means to them and their family when they lose a job.

They will be told it wasn’t about their performance, which means there wasn’t anything they could have done about it. They are basically told they were powerless to keep their job. That the thing which is so fundamental to their survival on earth and their identity as a person is completely out of their hands and can be ruined on a whim by someone who doesn’t even know their name. By someone who refers to them as a “resource” or a “headcount.”

So we should not be surprised when workers have absolutely zero loyalty to the company, and that they are completely jaded about anyone they work with caring about them beyond what they deliver.

It’s not just that we have created a depressing, impersonal, immoral, spiral-of-death workforce. It’s that we have taught everyone not to trust the people in their professional lives and that kindness is no longer profitable.