Employee Loyalty: An Examination

Abstract.

This article presents and examines four different reconstructions of Ronald Duska’s argument for the thesis that employees’ loyalty to their employers is misguided. One of them is the reconstruction presented by John Corvino in this journal. The remaining three revolve around, respectively, employers’ failure to reciprocate employees’ (attempts at) loyalty, the commercial character of employment, and the instrumental character of employment. The result of the examination is that the argument does not withstand scrutiny in any of the four reconstructions. The failure of Duska’s argument, however, does not mean that employee loyalty is justified, because the burden of proof is on the defenders of the loyalty. Moreover, a different argument, which is also presented in the article, shows that the loyalty of most present-day employees to their employers is bound to be significantly limited, because of the radical changeability of corporations with publicly traded stock.