Someone in my network moved his family across the country for a new job last year. New schools. New mortgage. A whole life uprooted on the strength of an offer letter. He was laid off eleven weeks later.
He is not the exception. I’m part of a network of senior executives navigating this job market, and I’ve heard this exact story so many times it has stopped shocking me. That should scare all of us.
American business has quietly rewritten its deal with workers. And a generation has been taking notes.
Start with the exit. Most U.S. employment is “at will.” A company can end your career anytime, for almost any reason, with no notice. That’s legal, and America sets no severance requirement. It’s brutal when a job search runs for months.
And the health insurance? It can end the same day. Not in 30 days, that day. For a client mid-cancer-treatment, or a parent covering a medically complex kid, that isn’t a policy detail. It’s a trapdoor. COBRA is supposed to be the bridge, but in 2025 the full family premium averaged nearly $27,000 a year or about $2,250 a month (Kaiser Family Foundation). This is why people don’t experience a layoff as a business decision. They experience it as abandonment.
First, the lies.
The excuse of the moment is AI. In April 2026, roughly a quarter of announced U.S. job cuts were blamed on it. The top stated reason two months running. But even the people building AI aren’t buying it. OpenAI’s Sam Altman has called it out as “AI washing.” They were cuts companies planned anyway. MIT’s Paul Osterman was blunter: AI is “a perfect excuse to justify big layoffs.”
The receipts back him up. In one Forrester survey, 55% of leaders who cut jobs for AI admitted it was a mistake. And AI is just the newest costume: a 2024 survey found eight in ten leaders had used “layoffs” to cut someone they wanted gone, and 54% did it to dodge paying severance. Workers can feel when they’re being lied to. They just can’t always prove it.
Then, the broken promises.
Millions took jobs sold as remote, then got return-to-office mandates — or relocate-or-quit ultimatums — they never signed up for. Amazon hauled hundreds of thousands back five days a week. Starbucks told corporate leaders to move to Seattle or Toronto within a year or take the exit. The excuse is always that presence drives performance.
It doesn’t. University of Pittsburgh researchers studied RTO mandates at big public companies and found no gain in financial performance — just a drop in employee satisfaction. As Wharton’s Adam Grant puts it, “Don’t mistake presence for performance.” The mandates didn’t bring the work back. They told people their trust was worth less than a badge swipe.
Finally, the math that gives the whole game away.
The average big-company CEO now makes about 281x the typical worker. At some companies it’s in the thousands. Starbucks hit 6,666x last year. Since 1978, CEO pay is up more than 1,000%. Worker pay: 24%. The pain isn’t shared. When Meta cut about 3,600 people it branded “low performers” in early 2025, it raised executive bonus targets from 75% to 200% of salary about a week later.
A generation raised on that arithmetic does not need an economics degree to reach a verdict.
I’m the parent of a Gen Z kid, so I hear the verdict at my own dinner table. Just 17% of Americans told Gallup in 2026 they have real confidence in big business, near a record low. Among adults under 35, nearly half now view socialism favorably. A colleague told me, half-terrified, that her son is becoming a full-blown socialist. I’ve seen what he’s seen: loyalty punished, honesty optional, promises reversed, the gains routed to the top.
When people stop believing their work protects them, they don’t decide one company is bad. They decide the system is rigged. And they go looking for another one.
And increasingly, they’re not just looking. They’re leaving. Americans filed a record 5.5 million new business applications in 2023 and have held roughly that pace since, up about 50% from before the pandemic. Nearly four in 10 recent college graduates say they’d rather start a business than climb someone else’s ladder. When a generation stops trusting the deal, they go into business for themselves.
Business leaders keep asking why young workers seem disloyal, disengaged, quick to walk. They have it backward. This generation isn’t refusing to buy in. They were never sold anything worth buying.
The fixes aren’t mysteries. Tell people the truth when you let them go. Give them a landing soft enough that losing a job doesn’t cost them the house. Honor the deal you hired them under, and when the company wins, cut in the people who built it. That’s the whole list. It costs money and it costs ego — which is exactly why most companies won’t do it, and why the sharpest young talent has already stopped waiting. They’re not disengaged. They’re gone, or quietly building the thing that takes your customers in 10 years. You didn’t lose their loyalty. You taught them not to offer it. That bill comes due on your watch.
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