Saturday, October 08, 2005

Does your boss feed you?

Happens to us all the time. Everybody who is employed by another human being often sees to his boss as the provider of livlihood. Imam Ali Zainul Abideen (AS) in his dua for seeking rizq has stated that we often seek rizq from those who are themselves marzooq, in other words fed by Allah. This is very true for those who are business owners as well who rely on the customers for their bread rather then having faith on Allah.

I I do not want to divert my dialogue to the business category for which I might write someday but I do want to clear what I think about employment and the employer. For me my employer or lets say my boss is merely a medium of my income and not the source. At times the employer feels that he is doing great favours on the employee by underminig his mistakes and so does the employee as he feels that if the boss would have fired him he would have been begging for bread.

I feel this attitude is the point where productivity of the employee decreases at a corporate level and increases to the personal boss (employer) level. Keep him happy.

What would you say if your boss over-looked your mistakes just for the sake of keeping your bread rolling in or just to think within himself that he was doing a favour on you. Let me be more precise, you had a fight with your boss and he took the matters to a higher authority and turned down their offer to take action against you just to later tell your collegues that he had a chance of taking action but he didn't. I would leave the decision on you but what I think is that your boss thinks he is the provider of rizq to you.

My reasoning might not be correct but I have a few points to share,
1. If he were so rationale he would not have complained to your superiors at all. Which landing your career in a jeopardy and your past efforts baseless.
2. He let go the opportunity to fire you for being a nice boy to his superiors.
3. If he were so nice he would not have spoken of his generosity to your collegues which did make him a hero.
4. His attitude of doing a favour on you is the most important factor to prove that there is no favour at all but to feed the self ego.

I might be a pessimist and therefore evalution of the situation are welcomed. The only base of my argument is that no human feeds another. It is Allah who graces people by his blessings and bounties. I would never be tied to the favours of my boss if he thought he was doing a favour on me. This is but a thought that my rationality teaches me though I also do fear loosing my job all the time. The insecurity in the lives of salaried people is often the reason why they lack behind in religion. Religion teaches that the provider of all life and its support is none but the lord.

May Allah bless Aqamoula (TUS) a long life. Ameen