Comment by imoreno

First of all, loyalty happens when both sides have moats. I'm not talking here about the case where one side is very loyal and the other is very disloyal - I'd rather call that "suckering". But in the US, government jobs have lots of mutual loyalty. The business can feel confident the employee isn't likely to leave, because for those jobs a huge part of the package is the pension which you only get after staying 20 years. And they heavily reward tenure. Meanwhile the employees also feel confident they won't be dumped (DOGE aside) because these orgs are structured in such a way that it's very hard to fire people due to process and culture. Lo and behold, plenty of loyalty in government jobs. US companies fire much more easily.

In European companies both firing and quitting is much more complicated, so you get employer loyalty in Germany or UK for example, because you actually get long term benefits there and termination is not as simple. The US companies of 50-80s like the author's father's employer were similar as well.

By the way, US companies don't actually demand loyalty. They pay lip service to it, but complaining about that is like complaining that people in clothing catalogs are too attractive. That's just how the field works, nobody takes it seriously and you look silly complaining about it. "Demanding loyalty" doesn't look like this. If an employer offered a $1 million bonus on your 10 year anniversary, that would be demanding loyalty for real. But neither the employee nor employer side has interest in this, not to mention the implied slowing down of the termination process. Plus the can of worms of knowing the company will even be around then.

Everything is fine, zoomers are not some insanely disloyal alien changelings. We're just in a transitional economy.