The numbers come first, and they are not flattering to corporate America. Just 17% of Americans told Gallup in 2026 they have real confidence in big business, near a record low. Among adults under 35, nearly half now view socialism favorably, according to the data cited in a Fortune commentary by consultant Lori Janke.
The structural facts explain some of the erosion. Most U.S. employment is 'at will,' meaning a company can end a job at any time, for almost any reason, with no notice and no federal severance requirement. Health coverage can end the same day as a layoff. COBRA, the bridge coverage, averaged nearly $27,000 a year for a full family premium in 2025, or about $2,250 a month, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Artificial intelligence has become a convenient explanation for cuts. In April 2026, roughly a quarter of announced U.S. job cuts were blamed on AI, the top stated reason for two months running. OpenAI's Sam Altman has called some of this 'AI washing' — cuts companies planned anyway. MIT's Paul Osterman went further, calling AI 'a perfect excuse to justify big layoffs.' A Forrester survey found 55% of leaders who cut jobs for AI admitted it was a mistake, and a separate 2024 survey found eight in ten leaders had used layoffs to remove someone they wanted gone, with 54% doing so specifically to avoid paying severance.
Return-to-office mandates tell a similar story. Amazon brought hundreds of thousands of workers back five days a week; Starbucks told corporate staff to relocate to Seattle or Toronto within a year or leave. University of Pittsburgh researchers studying RTO mandates at large public companies found no gain in financial performance, only a drop in employee satisfaction. Wharton's Adam Grant summarized it bluntly: 'Don't mistake presence for performance.'
Meanwhile the pay gap widened. The average big-company CEO now earns about 281 times the typical worker; at Starbucks the ratio hit 6,666x last year. Since 1978, CEO pay is up more than 1,000%, while worker pay rose 24%. When Meta cut roughly 3,600 employees branded 'low performers' in early 2025, it raised executive bonus targets from 75% to 200% of salary about a week later.
The market has already voted on where trust is going. Americans filed a record 5.5 million new business applications in 2023 and have held roughly that pace since, up about 50% from before the pandemic. Nearly four in 10 recent college graduates say they would rather start a business than climb someone else's ladder.
That is the real headline for anyone who believes in free enterprise: capital and labor alike are punishing companies that treat contracts as optional and rewarding the discipline of ownership. A generation souring on socialism-curious rhetoric while quietly filing for LLCs isn't rejecting markets — it's rejecting corporate leadership that stopped honoring the deal. Power leaves a paper trail, and so does trust. The fix isn't more regulation from Washington; it's boardrooms remembering that the productivity they demand of workers is worthless without the credibility they owe them in return.
