Employment expiry and the end of workplace loyalty

Employment no longer ends. It expires.

Talking about their experiences with layoffs, two women sat at a high table drinking coffee, only two meters away from me. I leaned in, and I listened.

My Sunday mornings are about reflection. My favorite thing to do is go to a coffee shop, journal, and try to make sense of the week behind me. This particular Sunday, I was journaling in my favorite spot when my mind started settling into the room instead of the page. I noticed the sounds, the smell of fresh pastries, dogs entering and leaving, the conversations layering over each other in the background. One of those conversations belonged to the two women, and once I caught the word layoff, I could not stop listening.

“The CEO called me during my lunch break on Microsoft Teams. She never calls. Out of the blue, she calls this time.” She went on. The moment she saw the call, she knew it had to be something important, probably about the layoffs the company had been going through for months, the same ones that had already taken some of her colleagues. The CEO told her the termination was effective immediately, thanked her for her services, and let her know all her access would be blocked right away. It was about budgetary cuts, about the company becoming more efficient. And that was it. The other woman at the table had a similar story.

If you work in tech, this is not a new story. But the tone in which it was told felt new to me. It felt normalized, as if it had not been a traumatic experience. The most traumatic part, it seemed, was that the CEO did it during the lunch break and interrupted a delicious meal.

And maybe it is normalized, especially for folks in tech. Look around and you see Meta letting go of 8,000 people, with Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle following the same pattern. We hear about cuts everywhere, in the name of efficiency, maybe because of AI, maybe because of how high interest rates are.

Employment no longer ends. It expires.

Think about the milk in your fridge. When milk expires, you do not feel betrayed by the milk. You do not sit on the kitchen floor wondering what you did wrong, or whether you should have loved the milk more. The milk had a date on it from the day you brought it home. You knew. So when it turns, you do not grieve. You restock. The only thing that can annoy you is the timing: the carton going off the morning you wanted cereal. That is the lunch break. That is exactly the emotion those two women had. Not heartbreak. Mild inconvenience that the expiry landed at a bad hour.

With milk, you can read the date. With employment, the cruelty is that the carton has no label.

Now compare that to how employment used to be described. We said people “lost” their jobs, the way you lose a person. A job ending was a rupture. It implied a relationship that was supposed to continue, a promise broken, someone done wrong. Ending is relational and it is emotional. You mourn an ending.

Expiry is administrative and it is scheduled. You plan around an expiry.

There is a shift in our psychological contract: the unwritten promise between an employer and an employee, the deal nobody signs but everybody believes. The old version was a covenant. Give us your time, your loyalty, your extra mile, and we will give you stability, growth, and a future. Most of us built our working lives on that promise.

And that is the shift. If employment expires, the promise is void. The company is no longer offering the future half of the deal. It is offering a paycheck until a date you are not allowed to see. Once you accept that, the rational response is not to grieve. It is to stop pouring everything into a carton with a hidden expiry date and to start keeping your own supply fresh.

I noticed this shift slowly. Only a few years ago, I worked at a company that frowned on any kind of side gig. It demanded loyalty, the extra mile, total dedication. It ran on performance cycles and nine-box grids that sorted you by potential and impact. It handed out shares you could only cash out if you stayed loyal for two or three years. If the contract did not expire first. Be exceptional or be redundant.

A psychological contract is about reciprocity, and reciprocity needs two signatures. When one party stops paying in, the other stops too. It is not bitterness; it is arithmetic. A company that cancels the covenant does not get a loyal workforce with loyalty quietly subtracted.

It gets people who keep their boxes half-packed.

Today, doing something on the side is the smart move. You cannot give your whole self to one company, because that company will not be loyal to you in return. It will be loyal for maybe two weeks of severance, and only because it has to. So while you build the company’s pipeline, the pipeline you actually need to protect is your own.

As I sat there listening, thinking about the layoff I went through a couple of years ago, I realized the two women were not speaking from grief. They were speaking with clarity. They never signed the covenant, so they had nothing to mourn. What an older eye reads as callousness is really just someone who stopped waiting for a label that was never going to be printed. They are not coping with the new contract. They are proof it has already changed.

I am the one still turning the milk carton over, looking for a date. Still signing the old version, still learning a language these two already speak. The contract changed and nobody sent me the memo, so the next time I sign, I will sign with very different expectations.

Sitting in that coffee shop at forty-five, I was not journaling. I was taking notes.

Chris Argyris, Understanding Organizational Behavior, Dorsey Press, 1960. The first use of the term “psychological work contract.”

Denise M. Rousseau, “Psychological and Implied Contracts in Organizations,” Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, 1989. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01384942

“8 ways Gen Z will change the workforce,” Stanford Report, 2024 (research by Roberta Katz). https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2024/02/8-things-expect-gen-z-coworker

Employment expiry and the end of workplace loyalty was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.