For Yourself Or The Company

Unless you are genuine friends with your employer or manager or have a rational, non-egoistic employer--a great rarity in certain countries--you will likely find all of your efforts invested into your company are overlooked or under-rewarded the moment there is relational friction, misunderstanding, or lesser financial success.  It is possible for employers and their employees to be actual friends.  Being an employer or manager does not make someone irrational or evil.  But if you ever have to choose between a personal need/priority and the benefit of the company, there is no reason to ever choose the latter in many cases unless there is some other personal reward to make up for it.

It cannot be selfish to seek or do any permissible thing, even if it is for oneself and not for another person or an organization of any kind.  The only requirements are that it is not evil or otherwise irrational.  Working for pay cannot be problematic.  What else are workers supposed to exchange their effort and productivity for?  An employer might pretend like there is some other necessary reason why someone deserves a job, but there is no additional component required.  People, unless they happen to fortunately enjoy what they do or unfortunately bow to social conditioning, work to survive and secure improvements to their life through money, and that is all that they need for plenty of jobs.

Employers overlook this in enough cases for it to be normalized. Since most people are non-rationalists, however, it is not only one's employers that are more likely than not to be driven by assumptions and preferences, but also one's fellow workers.  The epistemological divide between other minds, if they even exist (and I cannot know which logical possibility is true), bars one from knowing if they will betray one in an unjust way--yes, some betrayal is good and obligatory if morality exists (turning against immoral allies cannot be immoral)!  Caution with who is told about legitimate grievances, as opposed to invalid ideas like that all employees are oppressed just by not being employers, is needed.

Moreover, caution is needed in what is conveyed to them.  It is ideal to do what is best for oneself at all times as long as one is not neglecting reason or morality.  Although other employees at specific workplaces might be under the same yoke that you are, out of emotionalistic/irrationalistic folly or the hope of gaining from it, they might intentionally put a target on you.  In a non-egoistic way, do what is best for oneself and not for the company, an organization that could not exist without working people even if it tramples on their moral rights.  There is no Biblical obligation to destroy yourself for a company.

There are many ways people can sacrifice their moral standing, their mental or physical health, their joy, and their freedom for the sake of a job that will never reward them enough to justify anything more than the bare minimum.  It is not irrational or evil to sacrifice the success of a job for the sake of personal flourishing as long as there is nothing problematic about the exact way in which it is done.  Each person can work to better their own life rather than to better the popularity or financial returns of a distant, abusive, or incompetent employer or manager.  Unless they are a rationalist (other than young children and the mentally disabled), no person is worth such devotion.