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.<\/p>\n
He is not the exception. I\u2019m part of a network of senior executives navigating this job market, and I\u2019ve heard this exact story so many times it has stopped shocking me. That should scare all of us.<\/p>\n
American business has quietly rewritten its deal with workers. And a generation has been taking notes.<\/p>\n
Start with the exit. Most U.S. employment is \u201cat will.\u201d\u00a0 A company can end your career anytime, for almost any reason, with no notice. That\u2019s legal, and America sets no severance requirement. It\u2019s brutal when a job search runs for months.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t a policy detail. It\u2019s 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\u2019t experience a layoff as a business decision. They experience it as abandonment.<\/p>\n
First, the lies.<\/p>\n
The excuse of the moment is AI. In April 2026, roughly a quarter of announced U.S. job cuts<\/a> were blamed on it. The top stated reason two months running. But even the people building AI aren\u2019t buying it. OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman has called it out as \u201cAI washing<\/a>.\u201d They were cuts companies planned anyway. MIT\u2019s Paul Osterman<\/a> was blunter: AI is \u201ca perfect excuse to justify big layoffs.\u201d<\/p>\n The receipts back him up. In one Forrester survey<\/a>, 55% of leaders who cut jobs for AI admitted it was a mistake. And AI is just the newest costume: a 2024 survey<\/a> found eight in ten leaders had used \u201clayoffs\u201d to cut someone they wanted gone, and 54% did it to dodge paying severance. Workers can feel when they\u2019re being lied to. They just can\u2019t always prove it.<\/p>\n Then, the broken promises.<\/p>\n Millions took jobs sold as remote, then got return-to-office mandates \u2014 or relocate-or-quit ultimatums \u2014 they never signed up for. Amazon<\/a> hauled hundreds of thousands<\/a> back five days a week. Starbucks<\/a> told corporate leaders to move to Seattle or Toronto within a year<\/a> or take the exit. The excuse is always that presence drives performance.<\/p>\n It doesn\u2019t. University of Pittsburgh researchers<\/a> studied RTO mandates at big public companies and found no gain in financial performance \u2014 just a drop in employee satisfaction. As Wharton\u2019s Adam Grant<\/a> puts it, \u201cDon\u2019t mistake presence for performance.\u201d The mandates didn\u2019t bring the work back. They told people their trust was worth less than a badge swipe.<\/p>\n Finally, the math that gives the whole game away.<\/p>\n The average big-company CEO now makes about 281x the typical worker<\/a>. At some companies it\u2019s in the thousands. Starbucks hit 6,666x last year<\/a>. Since 1978, CEO pay is up more than 1,000%. Worker pay: 24%. The pain isn\u2019t shared. When Meta<\/a> cut about 3,600 people it branded \u201clow performers<\/a>\u201d in early 2025, it raised executive bonus targets from 75% to 200% of salary about a week later.<\/p>\n A generation raised on that arithmetic does not need an economics degree to reach a verdict.<\/p>\n I\u2019m 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<\/a> they have real confidence in big business, near a record low. Among adults under 35, nearly half now view socialism favorably<\/a>. A colleague told me, half-terrified, that her son is becoming a full-blown socialist. I\u2019ve seen what he\u2019s seen: loyalty punished, honesty optional, promises reversed, the gains routed to the top.<\/p>\n When people stop believing their work protects them, they don\u2019t decide one company is bad. They decide the system is rigged. And they go looking for another one.<\/p>\n And increasingly, they\u2019re not just looking. They\u2019re leaving. Americans filed a record 5.5 million new business applications in 2023<\/a> and have held roughly that pace since, up about 50% from before the pandemic. Nearly four in 10 recent college graduates<\/a> say they\u2019d rather start a business than climb someone else\u2019s ladder. When a generation stops trusting the deal, they go into business for themselves.<\/p>\n Business leaders keep asking why young workers seem disloyal, disengaged, quick to walk. They have it backward. This generation isn\u2019t refusing to buy in. They were never sold anything worth buying.<\/p>\n The fixes aren\u2019t mysteries. Tell people the truth when you let them go. Give them a landing soft enough that losing a job doesn\u2019t cost them the house. Honor the deal you hired them under, and when the company wins, cut in the people who built it. That\u2019s the whole list. It costs money and it costs ego \u2014 which is exactly why most companies won\u2019t do it, and why the sharpest young talent has already stopped waiting. They\u2019re not disengaged. They\u2019re gone, or quietly building the thing that takes your customers in 10 years. You didn\u2019t lose their loyalty. You taught them not to offer it. That bill comes due on your watch.<\/p>\n The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Someone in my network moved his family across the country for a new job last year. 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