Employers have regained their power over employees, and the effects are already showing up.
During the peak of the Great Resignation in November 2021, 4.5 million workers left their jobs voluntarily. As of last month, that number was about 3 million as employees hesitated to quit at a time when job searches can drag on for months.
Workers’ optimism for finding a job is lower today than during the pandemic in 2020, according to a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that workers were even less optimistic about finding a job today than they were in 2020. The average worker said they had less than a 50% chance of finding a job in today’s economy, according to the Fed data.
Even those who have a job are now having to deal with cuts to benefits and perks, if not mass layoffs, as AI advances and investors pressure companies to cut costs. Many are also forcing employees back to the office after years of flexible work and remote-work policies.
Employees who may not have tolerated such cuts in the past are now coping with them, according to a January survey from MyPerfectResume.
The survey of 1,000 adults found that only 7% of employees would quit their jobs over a mandatory return-to-office policy. That’s compared to 51% who said they would quit over the same issue in January 2025. More than 70% of workers also predicted they would have the same or less bargaining power to push for flexible work policies in 2026 than in 2025, the survey found.
“The era of employee leverage has ended,” Jasmine Escalera, a career expert at MyPerfectResume, said in a statement.
Office mandates lead the way
One of the starkest reminders that the workplace has shifted is the change in companies’ approach to remote work. A report from July by commercial real estate company Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. (JLL) found that Fortune 100 companies are forcing employees to work from the office an average of 3.8 days per workweek, compared with 2.6 days in 2023.
Some employers have gone even further, forcing employees to come into the office full-time and doing away with the flexible work policies of the pandemic era.
One such company is Instagram, whose CEO, Adam Mosseri, told U.S. employees in a companywide memo in December that they would need to work from the office five days a week. Parent company Meta has required employees to come into the office three days a week since 2023.
Automaker Stellantis started requiring workers to come into the office five days a week starting last month. Meanwhile, Home Depot in January announced a five-day return to office for employees starting earlier this month, at the same time it announced 800 layoffs.
Even Microsoft, which, after the pandemic, instituted a flexible work policy that allowed most employees to work less than 50% of the week remotely without needing manager approval, began requiring their workers in the Puget Sound region to come into the office three days a week starting in February.
Benefits are quietly shrinking too
The rollbacks that companies are pushing in today’s economy have also extended to benefits and perks. In February, Home Depot imposed stricter requirements for employee bonuses. A manager must now reach at least 95% of their store’s sales goal to qualify for a bonus, up from 90% previously.
At the same time, the retailer cut the amount paid out to those who reach only the minimum threshold. Those managers whose stores reached 95% of their sales goal, and no more, will receive 25% of their target bonus, down from 50% before. The changes come as the home-improvement retailer fell short of analyst expectations with $38.2 billion in sales, down $1.5 billion year over year.
Meta, whose CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has been one of the loudest voices calling for cost cutting and efficiency, has reportedly scaled back some perks for workers in recent years. Some of these changes include eliminating free laundry and dry cleaning as well as pushing back the time dinner is served in the office, so employees have to stay later to take advantage of it. Goldman Sachs, for its part, cut its free breakfast and lunch options, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Why workers aren’t pushing back
Companies’ cuts to perks and benefits, as well as their push to get more out of employees, come as unemployment stood at 4.3% in March. Potentially as a result of higher unemployment and low hiring, the overall quit rate has stayed below 2% for eight consecutive months.
March exceeded analyst expectations with 178,000 jobs added, but just a month before, the U.S. economy lost 92,000 jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford economist whose research helped define the Great Resignation, told Fortune last month that workers should not leave their current job without another lined up. “You don’t want to quit a job to find that what you thought would be easy — getting another job — turns out to be a massive struggle,” he said.
AI adoption is adding another layer of pressure. While AI is saving employees up to an hour per day, according to Goldman Sachs, companies are quickly filling this time saved with extra tasks by demanding more output from each worker.
The risk employers are taking
Jamie Shapiro, an organizational psychologist and CEO of the executive coaching company Connected EC, told Fortune that while employers push for greater productivity, they may also be underestimating the long-term costs to employees and the company as a whole.
This is especially true if cuts to benefits or perks are not doled out evenly, she said, and in such situations, employers need to ensure they communicate the reasons for the changes clearly.
“Anytime we have an abrasion of justice, we are going to see lower motivation of our employees because we want things to feel fair.”
The idea that squeezing workers harder produces more output, she argued, is a false narrative.
“When we don’t invest in our people, and we don’t care for their well-being, we actually get so much less out of them.”
The Great Resignation showed that employees offered a better deal elsewhere don’t hesitate to move on. This is a problem for companies, especially when the average cost of turnover per employee is about six to nine months of an employee’s salary, according to a study by the Society for Human Resource Management.
Employees who are constantly worried about the next layoff or benefit cut are not going to be loyal to their employers or brag to their friends about their company, which can help recruitment and the company’s brand.
Improving employees’ perception of the company as well as the amount of effort they contribute to an organization has everything to do with a company’s workplace culture, said Shapiro.
“When I’m somebody who’s on the front line, do I feel like my organization is being fair to me? And if the answer is no, then that can hurt motivation, and it can hurt not only the culture, but it can also hurt how much I feel invested in the organization,” she said.
Written by Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez for Fortune as “The power has swung back to employers — and workers are paying for it in benefits, flexibility, and leverage” and republished with permission.
