No employer can expect any employee to be loyal without first demonstrating his or her loyalty to the employee first.

I once worked for a man who said he only paid his employees just enough so that they wouldn't quit. He said they only worked just hard enough to keep from being fired. His two business struggled for years. Eventually he sold one to a highly successful business man, whose philosophy about employee/employer relationships I never learned. The second business owned by my employer went belly up.

A lost of ballyhooing has gone on about American productivity. Has anyone truly investigated where this increased productivity is actually coming from? How much of it, one wonders, has been derived from treating employees like grapes? You can only squeeze them just so much.