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Shallow roots

Employers used to value workers who stayed for years. Now they seem to think short is sweet.

When my father retired in 1988, after 30-plus years with an insurance company, he got an amazing goodbye party.

There was a formal dinner with speeches, and a cake decorated to look like his business card, and a pianist, and even a bagpiper. My sister, my son, and I flew in for the party - at company expense. After the speeches were over, my dad was flooded with gifts: a set of luggage, a personalized silver tray, a fancy crystal ornament.

I was telling a friend about this recently, and her mouth dropped open.

"Was he a CEO?" she asked. Actually, I said, he was just a salesman.

She was dumbfounded. Stories like this, of effusive expressions of loyalty between workers and their bosses, seem so archaic in the new economy that they're almost goofy.

Now, like ballplayers, we're all interchangeable free agents in the workplace. Dot-coms go bankrupt; companies don't hesitate to "rightsize" when the profit margins are down. A recent article in the American Journalism Review described "slimming down" efforts at a Minneapolis daily. The strategy is to "keep the coconuts moving" in the newsroom, according to the editor, in a kind of employee shell game.

Coconuts, of course, don't stick around long enough for a grand goodbye party, not that one would be forthcoming. I - of the age to have experienced the old economy - have worked for two companies in the last 25 years. My niece, 13 years younger, has worked for 10 in the last three years alone.

When my children were in elementary school, they had to memorize the school's core values (respect, responsibility, cooperation, and learning), which were emblazoned on the school's flag and repeated at assemblies. In my father's day, and even in the earlier days of my career, the workplace had core values, too, though they were too self-evident to bear repeating. They included integrity, honesty, and loyalty, that long-term mutual commitment that transcended the bottom line and gave employees the sense of security that their desk would still be there the next day.

But somewhere along the line, loyalty got plucked from the list. And we shrug and accept it. "The Death of Loyalty" had been distilled into just another newsmagazine cover story, like "The Human Genome" or "The MCAS Problem." One of my friends, a corporate lawyer, has been downsized from three different jobs in the last five years. "I believe in loyalty," he says. "And I try to be loyal. But what's the point?"

His wife, who is in the middle of a cutback-induced job search herself, adds: "Nobody takes care of anyone anymore. Sometimes," she sighs, "I think the only one who will be loyal to me in the end will be my dumb dog."

There are those who argue that loyalty itself isn't gone, it's just shifting. The wise workplace strategist, advises the 2001 career guide published by U.S. News & World Report, will "maintain loyalty to colleagues - not companies - and to the community."

As someone who has had the same office phone number for more than 15 years, I'm not sure this shift is so benign. I think about how much time I and my colleagues spend at work and how there aren't too many hours left for "the community." Work is my community, along with my family, and it's offered things no free agent would know about - continuity, stability, interconnection, a sense of identity, of belonging to something bigger than just me. Putting down roots - at home, in a neighborhood, at work - seems like the natural order of things, an innate nesting instinct. I try to imagine a world where we know everyone as snapshots, not as full-length movies, where our Rolodexes are big but our anchors are few. I wonder how far ahead a life full of short-term connections puts us on the human development scale. Not very far, I suspect.