The boss is back
As AI bites and job cuts surge, employees are losing ground — for now
Brooke Masters
© Matt KenyonNo more Mr Nice Guy.
Five years after the Covid pandemic forced employers to embrace empathy and flexibility, bosses are back to laying down the law.
Tough talk is everywhere: JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon blasted remote workers for being hard to reach on Fridays while Google co-founder Sergey Brin insisted in a memo that “60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity”.
AT&T boss John Stankey recently went beyond specific peeves to warn of a wholesale ideological shift.
The telecoms group, he wrote, would stop valuing “loyalty, tenure, and conformance” and move to “a more market-based culture — focused on rewarding capability, contribution, and commitment.”
The shift goes beyond talk.
BlackRock, Amazon and UPS have reimposed five-days-in-the-office mandates for big parts of their workforces.
Both Google and Microsoft have fired employees who protested against their contracts with the Israeli government, and Facebook owner Meta has reportedly warned workers who posted comments critical of management on its intranet that this would be considered in performance reviews.
Recruiters say that employers who had struggled to fill positions as the economy came out of lockdown are now ghosting job applicants and turning up their noses at strong candidates.
“I haven’t seen anything like this since the financial crisis,” says Kyle Samuels, who runs an executive search firm.
“Employers feel, “We’re the belle of the ball.”
The shifting balance of power between companies and their workers has multiple roots.
The political context certainly favours bosses: US President Donald Trump has publicly questioned the value of the federal work force, let go thousands of government employees and ended collective bargaining for 1mn more.
He is also reshaping the National Labor Relations Board, which enforces worker-protection rules, by firing its chair and adding two members that unions describe as “anti-worker”.
The economic backdrop has also strengthened management’s hand.
While US unemployment remains relatively low, many workers who do not like their jobs cannot readily find alternatives.
US-based companies have announced more than 800,000 job cuts so far this year, the most since the height of the pandemic.
The latest jobs report showed so few new openings that an enraged Trump fired the head of the agency that produced it.
Companies have been further empowered by the rapid rise of large language models and other artificial intelligence.
Many employers are holding off on hiring new workers while they wait to see whether AI can make their existing workforce more productive — or replace labour entirely.
This is particularly true in the bowels of technology companies: big employers which threw money at coders and engineers just a few years ago are now laying them off in droves.
At Amazon, which has eliminated 27,000 jobs since 2022, chief executive Andy Jassy has not been shy about predicting further cuts, and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff has boasted that AI is already doing 30 to 50 per cent of the company’s workload.
“Workers clearly are nervous about job security . . . That does make labour less confident that they are in the driver’s seat,” says Kate Duchene, head of RGP, a consultancy.
Still there are limits to the amount of control that employers can exercise over their employees.
Although some companies have resorted to “traffic light” attendance dashboards and Orwellian “letters of education” as they try to enforce attendance rules, working hours and office presence remain much more flexible than before the pandemic.
A July survey of US workers found that they do 27 per cent of their work from home, basically unchanged over the past year.
For office workers the figure is 43 per cent.
Employees have also countered the demands for an always on, ever present workforce with a series of subversive strategies.
Social media is full of terms such as “coffee badging”, slang for showing up to the office just long enough to swipe in and grab a cuppa, and “quiet vacationing” — scheduling emails, occasional video chats and setting up automatic responses to disguise time away.
Strict rules, demands for long hours and lay-off threats may boost corporate bottom lines initially, but there are big risks to this strategy.
AI is great for routine tasks, processing data and simple coding.
But more complex work will still require humans for the foreseeable future, and people with top skills remain in high demand.
Recruiters say they are already finding it harder to tempt prospects to try companies because they do not want to give up their flexibility or fear being caught in a wave of lay-offs.
On the flip side, bosses who bang on about how loyalty is passé should not be surprised when their top people start to act like star athletes and offer themselves to the highest bidder.
Silicon Valley is learning this to its cost right now, as Apple, Meta, Microsoft and others engage in a brutal war for AI talent with bonuses running to $100mn or more.
If you are still counting on humans to handle your company’s most complicated and high-stakes decisions, it seems like a poor strategy to alienate them ahead of time.
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