I was wondering , if you will be ready to work fof an organisation that you oppose ideologically , for instance you are against big oil but you get a job interview in exxonmobil with good pay , would you consider it ?
*Edit : Recently a friend of mine got a marketing job for a company that had shady business practices , selling their product to gullible parents. Since it was a marketing job , the pay was good but my friend left it within a week , saying it does not suit his ideology.
I’ve done this. I was working for scraps out of college as a community reporter when an ostensibly conservative online news organization offered me an 80% pay raise and the opportunity to do most of my work from home. I was young, recently married and wanted to start a family, and we needed the money. The bigger salary was nice, but over the course of two years I spiraled into a deep depression and began to loath myself and what I did. It was so bad I began looking for a way out after the first six months. Eventually I got out (took a pay cut to do so) but am now in a much better place personally and professionally. I would never do anything like that ever again.
Glad to know things are better now !
I consider most “for profit” corporations as corrupt and amoral.
So, yes. Those are the only ones who pay close to a living wage.
Many NGOs and not for profits pay well.
That must be location-dependant. I worked for a non-profit for nearly 5 years, a good sized one. The pay was significantly below the for-profit sector, and the organisation was pretty toxic to boot. I have many friends who did similar, and my assessment is that mine was probably the best experience. Burnout is the norm. Toxic culture is the norm. Underpay is the norm. It’s not an experience I’d be excited to repeat.
I think you can apply that to any area regardless of whether they are for or non-for profit.
No experience I’ve had in the corporate world has been as bad as what I saw everywhere in the non-profit world.
Not saying that for-profit companies don’t have these problems, not at all, but not to the same extent.
I don’t think that’s universal. I work for a NFP and the pay is about the same but the work environment is far, far better.
Glad to hear its not universal.
Agreed. I wouldn’t want to, say, work for a defense contractor, bit I’ve worked in traditional finance for years now, and I definitely disagree with it.
At my age? Yeah I would.
depends if the offer lets me do some good in the company. if im just a worker who has no say in anything, then no
Depends. Is more a smooth transition for me. Would work for Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, Microsoft if the pay was alright. Wouldn’t like to work for defense industry. Or big pharma.
It really depends on the job. I’d probably work for any tech company if the price was right, but I wouldn’t work for a right-wing publication or think tank ever.
Everyone has their own code of ethics, but I think almost every company has some things that might be controversial or that people don’t like. Even some of my favorite companies have done things that I am really opposed to.
I would not work in a job where I had to directly do things that I was morally opposed to. But we live in a society where huge companies touch our lives in a lot of different ways. If you are too strict about it, you might find that there aren’t many jobs available for you.
It depends, big oil yeah I guess, but for instance a company that make face recognition camera used in China to basically arrest people, no. As for instance I’d never work for a far-right pro-life company.
Definitely not.
I think money can and will never play down the feeling of working for something/someone that is against your principles and ideology. Every day you get up to work, while drinking your morning coffee you will have thoughts and hate about the place you will start working after commuting.
And do not forget, you will mostly have friends with similar ideology, they will disapprove of this too. Good friends will stay nonetheless but discussions will arise portably more often than you’d like about your choosing a workplace that is against all you believe in.
When you just go and work wherever because the pay is good, then your ideology is not more than a façade you hold up for yourself.
No matter how good the pay, the resulting cognitive dissonance would overwhelm me eventually and either lead to a mental breakdown, or me quitting. It wouldn’t be worth it.
I currently do. I worked for a European SME who was purchased by a fortune 500 company which are currently in the news for anti union actions in the US.
I am lucky enough that to fire someone in my country is a royal pain in the ass so I am always fine with calling out their horseshit in the internal company surveys.
No, unless:
- I would be tricked into it without the possibility to exit it immediately
- I didn’t realize it’s not what it claimed to be
- There would be no other way to put food onto a platter (I am ready to perform as an exotic dancer in LGBTQ+ clubs, if need be)
- The corpo in talking would be large, transnational and the problem would concern only some distant part of it, one I wouldn’t have any contact with.
But, of course, these scenarios are “once in a lifetime” kind of mental exercise. Nothing more. The answer is “no”.
Depends on how bad the company is and ig I’m in dire need of a job/ pay rise.
I’ve turned down jobs at Nestle and De Beers due to them being widely unethical and because I had a decent job at the time.
No. Never.
Unless you’re supportive of the concept that you’re a non-capitalist drone working to make a capitalist rich… You already do
I think it’s more a question of where the line is. You virtually always have to compromise in at least some small ways.
Would you work for a company where the CEO is an outspoken bigot? What about a company that constructs weapons for the military that you know will be used to kill thousands? Or one of those scam call centers, where your entire job would be scamming the elderly? Or taking to even more extremes, what about a criminal gang where you may have to directly kill people? For that matter, what about indirectly killing people, like if your employer is a massive polluter?
Some of these I’m not even certain of my answer for. In my current situation, I’m well off and don’t need to worry much about pay and finding work is easy. But what if I was in a desperate situation, where I was struggling to find work that paid enough to sanely live on? I know I’d definitely have a lower threshold then, but where exactly it lies is hard to say when I’m not in such a situation.
It’s the same with boycotts. If you’re in poverty and the only close store is a Walmart, good luck boycotting them. You do the best you can within the means you have.
