Someone in my network moved his family across the country looking for a new job last year. New schools. New mortgage. An entire life uprooted by the force of an offer letter. He was fired eleven weeks later. He is no exception. I’m part of a network of senior executives navigating this job market, and I’ve heard this exact story so many times that it no longer surprises me. That should scare us all. American companies have quietly rewritten their treatment of workers. And a generation has been taking notes. Start at the exit. Most employment in the United States is “at-will.” A company can end your career at any time, for almost any reason, without notice. That is legal and the United States does not impose any compensation requirements. It’s brutal when a job search lasts months. What about health insurance? It can end the same day. Not in 30 days, that day. For a client in the midst of cancer treatment, or for a parent covering a medically complex child, that is not a detail of the policy. It’s a trap door. COBRA is supposed to be the bridge, but in 2025 the entire family premium averaged almost $27,000 a year or about $2,250 a month (Kaiser Family Foundation). This is why people don’t consider layoffs as a business decision. They experience it as abandonment. First, the lies. The excuse of the moment is AI. As of April 2026, it was blamed for about a quarter of the announced job cuts in the United States. The most indicated reason for two months in a row. But even the people who create AI don’t believe it. OpenAI’s Sam Altman called it “AI washing.” They were cuts that companies were planning anyway. Paul Osterman, from MIT, was more forceful: AI is “a perfect excuse to justify large layoffs.” The receipts back it up. In a Forrester survey, 55% of leaders who eliminated jobs for AI admitted it was a mistake. And AI is just the newest disguise: A 2024 survey found that eight in ten leaders had used “layoffs” to fire someone they wanted, and 54% did so to avoid paying severance. Workers can sense when they are lied to. They just can’t always prove it. Then, the broken promises. Millions took jobs sold as remote and then received return-to-the-office mandates, or ultimatums to relocate or resign, to which they never signed up. Amazon brought back hundreds of thousands of people five days a week. Starbucks told corporate leaders to move to Seattle or Toronto within a year or get out. The excuse is always that presence drives performance. It’s not like that. Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh studied RTO mandates at large public companies and found no improvement in financial performance, only a drop in employee satisfaction. As Wharton’s Adam Grant says, “Don’t confuse presence with performance.” The mandates did not return the work. They told people that their trust was worth less than passing a badge. Finally, the mathematics that gives away the entire game. The average CEO of a large company now earns about 281 times more than the typical worker. In some companies they number in the thousands. Starbucks reached 6,666 times last year. Since 1978, CEO pay has increased more than 1,000%. Worker salary: 24%. Pain is not shared. When Meta laid off about 3,600 people it called “poor 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 doesn’t need a degree in economics to reach a verdict. I’m a parent of a Gen Z kid, so I’m hearing the verdict at my own dinner table. Only 17% of Americans told Gallup in 2026 that they had real trust in big companies, near an all-time low. Among adults under 35, nearly half now view socialism favorably. A colleague told me, half terrified, that her son is becoming a full-fledged socialist. I’ve seen what he’s seen: loyalty punished, honesty optional, promises reversed, profits sent to the top. When people stop believing that their job protects them, they don’t decide that a company is bad. They decide the system is rigged. And they are going to look for another one. And increasingly they don’t just look. They are leaving. Americans filed a record 5.5 million new business applications in 2023 and have maintained roughly that pace since, up about 50% from before the pandemic. Nearly four in 10 recent college graduates say they would rather start a business than climb someone else’s ladder. When a generation stops trusting the deal, they start their own business. Business leaders continue to ask why young workers seem disloyal, disengaged and willing to walk. They have it backwards. This generation does not refuse to accept it. They were never sold anything worth buying. The solutions are not mysteries. Tell people the truth when you let them go. Give them a soft enough landing that losing their job won’t cost them their house. Honor the agreement you hired them under, and when the company wins, cut the people who built it. That’s the complete list. It costs money and it costs ego, which is exactly why most companies don’t do it and why the smartest young talent has stopped waiting. They are not disconnected. They are gone, or they are quietly building what attracts their customers in 10 years. You didn’t lose his loyalty. You taught them not to offer it. That bill is due under your supervision. The opinions expressed in Fortune.com comments are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
