"We're Like Family Here"

There’s a line you see in job posts and onboarding decks all the time. “We’re like family here.”

It sounds warm. It’s meant to. And for a long time I took it at face value, because that’s the story we all got handed about work: your job is who you are, the company is your family, you give it everything and it takes care of you.

That last part is the lie. The company is your family right up until the quarter goes bad. Then you find out how much of a family it really was. The same companies that put “we’re like family here” in the job post will lay off ten thousand people over a Zoom call and a severance email. The family language does one job. It gets more out of you than they’re paying for. Love has nothing to do with it.

Then there’s that whole thing about “being family” so you sacrifice. That’s complete BS. Those are bad managers, or the evils of late-stage capitalism: squeezing more out of the workers to get more profit. I get it when things are tight, or there’s a deadline or a big project. But that has to be the exception and not the rule.

And true enough, I’ve been in organizations where they underline the family aspect, and what they really mean is this: we’re unorganized, and we need you to go the extra mile to cover for it. That never sat well with me.

At work, especially in Asia, there’s this thing called pakikisama that pushes people to do things they don’t want to do, to go the “extra mile.” There really is merit to it. But everyone has their own limits and boundaries, and management should understand that. I’m not giving introverts a free pass either. You do need to mingle and socialize. That really is just part of work (and of living). But let’s all meet in the middle.

Sometimes it hides in food. You see it in those US work memes where the boss buys everyone pizza, as if a few boxes make up for the free hours and the perpetual overtime. It doesn’t. That’s toxic work culture. I’ve been in companies where the boss always treated the staff to free meals. He had the budget for it, and Filipinos love a free meal. But there was something more sinister underneath the feeding.

And the sad part is we didn’t even need this. We already had the real version of the thing America was only pretending to sell. We had actual family. Neighbors who show up. The lola who watches the kids. The Sunday lunch that takes the whole afternoon while nobody once checks the time. We came from a culture that already knew the people around you are the point. And we’re trading it. Trading Sunday lunch for a deck due Monday. Trading time with the people who will actually be at our funeral for people who will repost the job opening within a week of us leaving.

A job is a fair trade. You give work, they give pay. That’s clean and honest and there’s nothing wrong with it. The trouble starts when they dress the trade up as love, so you hand over the parts of your life that were never for sale.

Know your worth. Do good work and be proud of it. But do it for yourself. Your worth is yours to carry from one job to the next. The company is not your family, whatever the job post said. Your family is already your family. They were there before the job, and they’ll be there long after it.

Make the time. Nobody at the office is saving you a seat at your own dinner table.