Employee Survival Guide® - Employnomics Is Everything Employers Do to Employees Everyday

Episode Date: November 24, 2025

Comment on the Show by Sending Mark a Text Message.The rules at work often feel invisible until they hit you in the paycheck, the bathroom break you can’t take, or the termination you didn’t see coming. We put a name to that operating system—employonomics—and trace how it quietly moves power, money, and risk from employees to employers through legal frameworks and everyday practices that look neutral but bite hard.We unpack how discrimination becomes profitable when arbitration buries public scrutiny, how noncompete agreements suppress wages and stall careers, and why wage theft thrives through misclassification and “exempt” titles that don’t match the job. We go inside the mechanics of performance improvement plans that prepare the legal runway more than they coach, and we interrogate return-to-office pushes that serve leases over outcomes. Along the way, we connect the dots between vague HR feedback, algorithmic quotas that shrink basic dignity on the warehouse floor, and the keystone that holds it all together: at-will employment, a rule that converts managerial preference into a shield and shifts the burden to workers to prove the unprovable.There’s a different path. We spotlight for-cause termination as a credible alternative that builds trust, show how Montana’s model changes the incentives without freezing management, and outline practical ways organizations can trade secrecy for standards—dropping noncompetes, paying for every hour worked, and giving real due process in performance decisions. When policies stop hiding harm and start honoring fairness, engagement improves, talent sticks, and culture becomes more than a poster in the lobby.If you want a workplace that rewards merit without erasing humanity, press play, share this with someone stuck under “policy,” and add your voice. Subscribe for more straight talk on work, leave a review to boost the signal, and tell us: which policy should be the first to go? If you enjoyed this episode of the Employee Survival Guide please like us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. We would really appreciate if you could leave a review of this podcast on your favorite podcast player such as Apple Podcasts. Leaving a review will inform other listeners you found the content on this podcast is important in the area of employment law in the United States. For more information, please contact our employment attorneys at Carey & Associates, P.C. at 203-255-4150, www.capclaw.com.Disclaimer: For educational use only, not intended to be legal advice.

Hey, it's Mark here, and welcome to the next edition of the Employee Survival Guide, where I tell you, as always, what your employer does definitely not want you to know about, and a lot more. Hey, it's Mark, and welcome back to the next edition of the Employee Survival Guide, where I tell you, as always, what your employer does not want you to know about and a lot more. Today we're talking about employonomics, the thing that employers do to employees every day. Employonomics is a term covering literally every aspect of working in the dysfunctional relationship between corporate management and all employees. The term is synonymous with corporate power and money to the immediate disadvantage of employees. Employinomics is the intention and often willful behavioral

force, the imbalance of power or leverage, and the dehumanization of employees, all with a singular goal of making money for employers at any cost. Discrimination pays in the system of Employonomics, whether at the individual manager or coworker level, discrimination can be used to increase the economic political clout of each offender. At the systemic level, the organization benefits financially our anti-discrimination laws are designed to deter economic gains resulting from overt and subversive discriminatory employment practices, yet the system is imperfect. The term Employinomics helps explain why employees never get a benefit from entering into a non-competition agreement. Employees never ask for the agreement, and they cannot negotiate the terms of the

one-sided adhesion contract. Employers use non-compete agreements as corporate chess pieces to fend off competition, stifle third-party development and ruin careers in the process. The term employonomics explains why employers push employees into forced arbitration agreements to hide their discriminatory and previously distorted sexual harassment cases, which is now illegal. It is the greatest corporate damage control instrument ever created to benefit employer reputations, especially in the era in the internet age. Arbitration saves money for employers who will have to pay for discrimination and corporate abuse of whistleblowers. Arbitrators are known to split the baby regarding judgments, some for employees, and here's some for employers. Employees never

agreed to or could negotiate these one-sided agreements. Courts in Congress have all but eternally sanction arbitration under the Federal Arbitration Act. Arbitration pays and benefits only employers. The term employonomics also explains how employers deliberately engage in wage theft under state and federal law. Billions of dollars are saved each year through the trickery of 1099 employment and full view of regulators with the lack of resources to combat them all. The term employnomics helps explain why Amazon factory workers cannot take a urination break on the floor. Employinomics also includes the pervasive performance improvement plans used to build defense cases, not better employee performance. The term employingomics is also synonymous with current management efforts to force productive remote workers back to the office because the employers need to utilize office rents.

The term employingomics can also help explain why employers are shifting away from providing performance reviews and feedback to something even more vague and confusing HR language to make employees. feel less anxious about getting performance feedback from their managers. And here's my favor. Employingomics concept of all time, the at-will rule. A legal term to conceal a vast majority of discriminatory and regulatory behavioral without legal consequence. Billions are saved each year under the guise of the at-will termination. As courts routinely uphold this prerogative of employers, employees face an enormous financial and emotional burden to demonstrate such terminations were illegal, which is exponentially more complicated when the termination is labeled as a reduction in force, mass layoff, and headcount reduction. Yet, employers still

cannot understand why employees just don't trust their employers and corporate culture is always non-existent. Employee engagement is at an all-time low in 2025. Employers would financially benefit from hiring employees with for-cause termination basis, which promotes a foundational trust between employees and private government they work for. Montana is the only state in the country that has successfully legalized for cause terminations and done away with the out-will employment rule. The list of situations covered by the term of employmentomics is endless. Now we have a term or word of art to describe how employers adversely benefit from the

imbalance of power over employees. If you like the Employees Survival Guide, I'd really encourage you to leave a review. We try really hard to produce information to you that's informative. that's timely that you can actually use and solve problems on your own and at your employment. So if you like to leave a review anywhere you listen to our podcast, please do so. And leave five stars because anything less than five is really not as good, right? I'll keep it up. I'll keep up the standards up.

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