The Satyam case has among other things put as exhibit corporate loyalty. Over the last few years in India, especially with that curious phenomenon of companies having campuses instead of offices, there has been an excessive trend towards employees displaying their loyalty to corporate entities. And this has even extended to employees calling themselves -ites, -ians and the like, with the prefix being some truncated moniker of the company. There is an earlier tradition in India where people were loyal to their employers, many of whom belonged to the same caste or clan. But the present-day variant is a peculiar mutant. Loyalty to companies in a capitalist employer-employee relationship is a phenomenon that in keeping with the season is a ripe candidate for liquidation.
A case for summary burial begins with the position that companies work within a capitalist system where the free movement of labour is celebrated. Most requests to the government always speak of a less restricted labour regime where people can be hired and fired without attracting harsh penalties. And that seems to be a fair way in which to operate. Such an operational ethos demands a free movement of labour to go with the free movement of capital.
In such a scenario, the employee has a contractual obligation where her compensation is related to the company’s need, and in the event of either party not finding the contractual relationship worthy of continuance, ends the same. The obligation in this case is to the work, fealty is to the task that has to be performed, fairness is to the team members one works with at any given point of time to ensure that one is pulling one’s due load. That is where it ends.
Singing hosannas to the promoter(s) or manager(s), wearing T-shirts with the name of the company, believing in the company as if one were born into it (or possibly a modern dwija) and calling oneself an -itian and -ician are signs of unquestioning intellect and sorry notions of the self.
At a psychological level one wonders what self-respect can they have whose identities are formed not by the work they do but the company where they work. At a more workaday level, if they do not understand the necessarily transient nature of their presence in organisations, after all even their bosses have moved or formed companies by leaving their former organisations, then it is indeed being dumb.
At an ethical level if this is indeed a charade in which they participate to ensure their rise up the ladder, then it is not merely being a dissembler, but also being inherently deceitful.
There is a point where loyalty to organisations will clash with being true to more fundamental values like upholding the law of the land, standing up for natural justice, and fighting for what is right. Companies as entities that come into being by law can never either be a filial community where ties of blood bind one or even be an imagined community that calls us to higher and nobler deeds.
The nation or sub-nations can at best or, often, at worst demand our loyalty. Companies asking for the same is ludicrous when at the end of the day an employee is a head count and the relationship is inherently instrumental.
Further, what such misplaced notions of the self do is to blind individuals to calls higher than just what the boss ordered or what the CEO sermonised. The absence of any whistle-blower in organisations (and Satyam’s case is not an exception but one fears the rule even if the magnitude may be different) is the result of such unquestioning behaviour and mind. One cannot help but smile when employees and sometimes those with just single-digit stakes, who have barely been with an organisation for a few years, speak of “the company’s way of doing work” or “we at this company believe… .” Loyalty is either an amoral egoisme a deux that wants to ride on the gravy train or naivete that erroneously conflates identities misrecognising the nature of employment.
Loyalty belongs to the realm of the personal. It belongs to ties of filiation. And as having any bearing on material relations, it belongs to a feudal order. Its use in the capitalist workplace is an attempt to draw upon a traditional resource to suit a modern end.
In the corporate world of targets and P&L, its use is manipulative in unsuspecting minds, strategic in careerists, and corrosive in a system that ought to live by laws.
One should remember that that the word “loyal” has its origins in the word, lex, meaning law is another matter.
Appeared in the Bangalore Mirror. Read here.
