Loyalty

I’ve been thinking a lot about loyalty lately.

My grandfather wrote at least a few lines in a journal every day for something like forty years. My dad has a box of these little annual journal books and the only gap was when my dad was born. He’d write down what the weather was like, what happened that day, maybe how he felt about it.

Through those journals, we can trace his professional life.

When he was old enough to work, he got a job operating an elevator for a company called Fafnir Bearing, which designed and manufactured ball bearings. Those were the days when elevators had operators.

By World War II, Fafnir Bearing was pumping out 100 bearings per minute from their 600,000 square foot factory in New Britain, Connecticut. They were the biggest independent bearing manufacturer in the United States. They manufactured parts that went to the moon on Apollo 11.

Over those years, my grandfather moved from the elevator to the factory floor. From the factory floor to the design department. When Japanese fighter planes were recovered by the US military during the war, my grandfather was among the folks who helped analyze their technology. He learned everything he knew “on the job.”

He ended his career as a master draftsman at Fafnir Bearing. He had worked there for his entire life. After his death, his widow—my grandmother—had cataract surgery and it was paid for by the Fafnir Bearing insurance trust. Her healthcare was taken care of for the rest of her life.

Today’s companies grow so fast. They hire and fire so fast. Reid Hoffman (the co-founder of LinkedIn, among other things) even wrote a book about it called “Blitzscaling” (a profoundly gross book, by the way). A generous synopsis of the book is, “grow so fast that you have built a competitive moat before anyone else can catch up to you.”

A more realistic one is, “own the market before the realities of your lopsided business model catch up to you because by then it won’t matter!” You’re a monopoly, you’re a monopsony; you’re the immovable object and the unstoppable force! You’ll be able to fuck everyone equally, just like Amazon does! Suppliers? Fuck them! Customers? Fuck them, too!

Employees? Well, you get the picture. Cory Doctorow calls it “enshittification.”

Imagine what business could be like if we actually cared. About people. About their future. About our future together. Companies don’t exist without people, as hard as Sam Altman may try to change that.

Wait, no, don’t imagine, I’ll tell you about one. I’m sure you know of Costco, the membership-only warehouse club store. I’m confident you’ve heard of them because they’re the third largest retailer in the world by revenue (right after WalMart and Amazon), so what I’m about to share isn’t a function of not making a ton of money or anything.

Costco reportedly has a 90% retention rate across all employees who stay on beyond their first year. Loyalty is a two-way street and Costco has figured out how to pave it. They have built a strong corporate culture around hiring from within; many of their senior executives started their Costco careers in a warehouse.

Meanwhile, internal Amazon documents were leaked to Engadget in 2022 that showed that the company had a 150% annual turnover rate, which Forbes claimed is double the “industry average.” Why do people want to stay at Costco, and why do people want to leave Amazon?

The answer to that question is the foundation of loyalty. If you are loyal to your employees, they feel safer investing themselves in you. If you run your business like a human woodchipper, you take what you can get.

In 2023, Amazon stopped testing job applicants for cannabis use. Now, I don’t care if you smoke weed, and neither should Amazon, but the story they told us was that “eliminating pre-employment testing for cannabis allows us to expand our applicant pool.” Let me translate that for you: we have to backfill a ton of roles and we’re running out of people who haven’t smoked weed lately.

Think about that for a hot second. Amazon had to loosen their long-held drug use policy specifically because they were failing to get enough people to run through their little gauntlet.

On July 1, 1978, the New York Times prepared their newspaper for print. The process was carried out in the same way that it had been, in the same composing room, for the last 127 years. But that night was different.

It was the last time that the New York Times would use “hot type,” a method by which letterforms are cast line-by-line into molten lead and set into columns and pages by hand. From the following day forward, the Times was typeset on computers and the press plates were produced using a “cold type” process.

Those 127 years of Times history were made possible by the Mergenthaler Linotype machine, a fantastically complicated but remarkably reliable hot type “line casting” machine invented by German clock maker Ottmar Mergenthaler and first deployed in 1886 at the New York Tribune.

One quirk of the Linotype machine is its entirely alien keyboard, arranged in sections by case, number, and in order by English letter frequency. To the best of my knowledge, that keyboard layout was never used before, and would never be used again by any other machine.

The Times meticulously planned the transition from “hot type” to “cold type.” They had to buy, install, and configure banks of computer terminals, huge reel-to-reel tape storage machines, and so forth. They had to run both Linotype machines and computers in parallel to be sure it would all work. There are print deadlines to keep!

In the fantastic documentary Farewell, Etaoin Shurdlu, you will meet some of the typsetters who spent decades hammering on the keys of Linotype machines. There is a certain romanticism around it. You will also learn that the Times re-trained any typesetter willing to stay in how to use the “cold type” methods.

This loyalty of the Times to its typesetters was surely both a cultural waypoint in American labor history, and also a direct result of the incredibly strong International Typographical Union (ITU), whose “New York Local #6” chapter was referred to in composing rooms as “Big Six.”

At the turn of the century, unions like the ITU were responsible for structural changes in work conditions that we all blindly take for granted. Thanks to organized strikes in most major cities in 1906, the ITU won an eight-hour work day for its typesetters (down from the ten-hour standard at the time).

Still, unions notwithstanding, we have choices about where we invest our energies. As employers, are we willing to invest in education, on-the-job training, and are we able to take a long view of an employee’s value to the business?

As employees, are we prepared for the possibility that any employer can, without provocation, instantly end our employment? Are we taking advantage of every benefit the company is offering so that we are ready for the day that some fundamental technology or process shift occurs?

In our “work at will” atmosphere here in the United States, I’m afraid there are no guarantees. But if we play our cards right, maybe we can make the most of it.

For the leaders out there, here is my question for you:

Who is your “elevator operator?” What would it take for them to become a “master draftsman?” That’s what loyalty looks like. What it used to look like, right here, in this country, when we put our people first.

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