Brett Trainor, a career coach focused on helping Gen X “escape” the nine-to-five corporate life, has a warning for his compatriots: Companies are making a string of intentional decisions to devalue workers, particularly Gen X (those between the ages of 44 and 59).
In a recent TikTok, Trainor, a Gen Xer himself who quit his corporate job during the pandemic after 30 years, explained just how companies are squeezing their mid-senior-level executives. He kicked off the video by saying no part of the current corporate playbook is good for workers.
“You know that the CEOs are not playing by the same rules where they used to pretend, at least a little bit, to care about the people within the organization,” Trainor said. These days, their goal is quite singular: short-term shareholder value, which ends up equaling C-suite compensation.
Profits over people
One of the ways companies are prioritizing shareholder value over long-haul strong employees is by doling out what Trainor calls “phantom PIPs [performance improvement plans],” he said. “They’re pushing out really good employees that have never had a problem before.”
The second—and much more recognizable—move: Return-to-office mandates, which Trainor said often function like forced push-outs. “It’s just another veiled excuse to get people to quit,” Trainor said.
The third method is job consolidations and dry promotions. “They’re consolidating positions in order to save money, and promoting people without paying them.” (A dry promotion describes an employee who’s given a new job title, with all the requisite new responsibilities—but no pay raise.)
Trainor characterizes the three-pronged approach as “low-hanging-fruit expense reduction.”
Then there are the more immediate, pernicious methods of devaluing workers: layoffs and outsourcing, which companies will turn to if the first three methods don’t lead to the expense reduction they’re looking for.
“They’re going to look to outsource any job they can, and then ultimately just reduce headcount—they’ll figure it out later,” Trainor said.
After that, companies might move on to stock buybacks. “It’ll really improve the shareholder value,” he said, reasoning that executives’ thinking might be, “Let’s buy back the stock and artificially inflate the share price, because [then both] shareholders and the C-suite wins.”
Trainor says the playbook he’s sketched out is currently in motion at dozens of firms—most recognizably in their return-to-office mandates.
“You’ve got Amazon, you’ve got Dell, and, to an extent, Microsoft, forcing a full return to office,” he said. “But this is just a rinse and repeat process.”
In 2023, the median tenure among Fortune 500 CEOs was five years for men and 3.8 years for women.
“That’s right in line with what these short-term plans are,” Trainor said. “They’re trying to maximize the share price so they can optimize their compensation in the short term.” Only 8% of Fortune 500 CEOs’ tenures exceed 20 years, he went on. “You’re gonna see this over and over again, with [executives] not even pretending about the people aspect of it.”
More to the point, CEOs “have zero interest in the long-term value,” Trainor told Fortune on Monday. “They won’t be there.”
Reaping what they sow
Each of these moves will end up costing the executives who carry them out, Trainor wrote on LinkedIn last month. “They’ll likely lose their most in-demand employees first—those who will have the easiest time finding new jobs,” he said. “They’ll also crush morale and create a huge amount of resentment from the employees forced to head back to the office against their will.”
Each of these actions, which Trainor considers “low-hanging fruit,” do little more than “reinforce the unfortunate reality that employees are treated like numbers on a spreadsheet,” he added.
“Historically—and I was in corporate for over two decades—layoffs were a last-ditch effort to save the company,” Trainor told Fortune on Monday. “It was hard to bounce back from mass layoffs, and most of the companies I was with didn’t make it.”
This was still the case, up until the pandemic. “Loyalty to employees was fading, but they still pretended to care,” he recalled. “Now layoffs are a business strategy. You see companies with record profits laying folks off to improve the bottom line. Now they package that with stock buybacks, and you have the new playbook.”
And before anyone claims that layoffs are a direct result of advancements in AI—or in thin margins—Trainor says most companies aren’t there yet. “Few of these layoffs are a direct result of AI implementation,” he said. “Those days will come, but they have not figured that out yet. Many large older companies are still trying to figure out how to leverage digital, let alone AI.”
