Why work feels worse — and who's actually to blame
Companies blame everyone but themselves.
On May 1, 1886, hundreds of thousands of laborers in Chicago participated in a multi-day strike, demanding an 8-hour workday. They were tired of the unfair and oppressive practices that required grueling workdays, sometimes longer than 16 hours.
In the nearly 140 years since then, corporations have become really good at misdirection. Company profits fall? Blame remote work for killing productivity. People aren't working at 150% capacity? They are quiet quitting. Can't find a job? Blame immigrants or DEI. Can't find someone to fill a low-paying role with no benefits? "Nobody wants to work anymore!"
Work feels worse now than it has at any point in my memory (in a nearly 20-year career). If you feel the same way, you're not imagining it. But we've been told to blame the wrong things — and the wrong people.
The misdirection of blame
In February 2025, Starbucks laid off more than 1,000 employees. CEO Brian Niccol claimed that this wasn't a cost-cutting measure; rather, that the employees were "not effective."
Yet Niccol, hired in late 2024, was given an astonishing pay package of $96 million four months after he was hired. The previous CEO, Laxman Narasimhan, had a compensation package of $21.5 million.
Starbucks, which has struggled in recent years, could address its "ineffective employee" problem in many different ways. Provide internal training, maybe costing the company a few million. If the employees were truly ineffective (doubtful), replace them with better employees. Instead, Starbucks chose to pay nearly $75 million more to its CEO and blame employees for the company's problems.
Former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt blamed remote work for Google's lag in the AI race. "Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning,” Schmidt said during a conversation with Stanford University students.
But, as I have said for years, if remote work fails, that is a management failure, not an individual one. Managers are responsible for setting priorities, expectations, and deadlines.
(Or perhaps Google has been distracted by years of court battles over whether or not it is an illegal monopoly. Just a thought.)
It's rare to see any company own up to its own failures. Instead, these companies work hard to sow the seeds of discontent among workers. If workers blame each other, they don't work together. They don't gather in a corner and whisper about how they wish things could be better. And they certainly don't organize and demand change.
What we can do differently
It's easy to believe a narrative when it is prevalent and pervasive. And we're all so tired and burned out from companies that demand more and give less. People are clinging to jobs by a thread, afraid of the tumultuous job market and economic uncertainty.
Meanwhile, U.S. billionaire wealth has grown by $2.1 trillion since 2020, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. And we're being asked to do more with less.
Amid growing pressures and blame from companies, it's important to pay attention to patterns. If you're struggling at work, who is actually making the decisions that are leading to your burnout? What power do you have to fight back (even if it's just setting boundaries around what you will and will not do)?
If the company is struggling, what are the actual reasons? When I look at dying companies, I look first at management decision-making.
Find the people you can talk to about work. If it's not co-workers (if that doesn't feel safe), then like-minded individuals in a group outside of work. It's possible to resist in small ways. And we don't have to resist alone.
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