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In the last few days, I've had some cause to think back over jobs I've had before. At present, I hold a full-time job and a part-time job, as well as doing some freelance work (if not, perhaps, as much as I might want to have); in the past, I've held various combinations of the same. The earlier setups were not as good for me as the present seems to be--with the exception of the full-time job I had for some years in The City, which paid well and allowed me to pretend for a while that I was living my dream. But I woke up from that dream years ago, now, and I have not fallen back asleep to seek it out again. Nor do I think I ever shall.
As I look back on matters, I recognize that no few of my former employers were evil. Some, I recognized at the time as being so. A boss who openly derides employees to others as he makes much of being not only the smartest person in the room, but the only smart person in the room, and who works to enthrall employees to him in a manorial relationship, whose money moves irregularly and who seems to have ties to organized crime has to be regarded as such. So does one who looks at a gathering of employees and tells them their workplace is a tax write-off waiting to happen--after he has been convicted of embezzling from employees' retirement accounts.
I have not always been so aware of things in the moment, though. My first on-the-books job, being my first, and me being raised in Central Texas (with it's "ride for the brand" ethic) by Midwesterners not far removed from the farm, did not register to me as being run by evil when I started working it. In others, I was still naïve enough to think that those working with me were as driven by the same putatively noble goals as I was--at least, as I started working. I learned better in each case, to be certain, and I did not always adjust well to the revelation. Clearly not, because I am no longer in those jobs. (The jobs themselves are not necessarily still there, either. But I take only small delight in such; I know somebody else needed the work and now does not have it.)
My present work offers me little such uncertainty. I know the full-time job is working to the good; I help others to help people, and I help people more directly, in it. I know the part-time job is ultimately working for evil people; it is a for-profit enterprise, and that profit orientation means that other concerns can and will be discarded in favor of increasing profit for those poised to earn it. (I am not one of those people; I've never seemed to be smart enough to get into that kind of thing.) The freelancing goes different ways, depending on the clients. And I probably ought to be upbraided for continuing to work for those I know are bad. I consider the matter regularly. But I need the money too badly, which I know is something true for a great many people. Nor can I take the risk on what is essentially the prisoner's dilemma; I cannot count on enough people doing what I believe to be the right thing to believe that I and those who depend upon me will not be harmed by my doing so.
I am certain I am not alone in it, though.