WSJ Your Money Briefing - What ‘Everyone’s Replaceable’ Means in Today’s Job Market

Episode Date: May 15, 2025

Amid economic uncertainty, some companies expect more work and less complaining from employees. Wall Street Journal reporter Chip Cutter joins host Derricke Dennis to discuss this shift in the workplace and how employees can survive an ‘everybody’s replaceable’ culture. Sign up for the WSJ's free Markets A.M. newsletter.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm Derek Dennis for the Wall Street Journal. Some company leaders are telling workers to stop complaining, step it up, and embrace AI, or lose their jobs. And that tough talk has left employees wondering how they can navigate such a hard turn in the workplace. You can try to buddy up with a boss and you can try to make yourself as just as sort of like valuable as possible. Workers have really been rattled by this wave after wave of layoffs inside companies. And so

I think everybody's just trying to figure out how do you hold on? How do you keep your skills relevant? How do you survive? We talk with Wall Street Journal reporter Chip Cutter about what led to this shift in tone, when things could change, and how some workers are responding. That's after the break. When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most? When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard? When the barbecue's lit but there's nothing to grill. When the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner.

Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer, so download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes. Plus enjoy zero dollar delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees exclusions and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. More company leaders have gotten tough on workers, flat out telling them everybody's replaceable. Wall Street Journal reporter Chip Cutter joins me with more on what he writes is a war on talent.

Chip, when did things change? It's such a shift from what we've seen in the past. I mean, it used to be the war on talent. Chip, when did things change? It's such a shift from what we've seen in the past. I mean, it used to be the war for talent. Companies couldn't hire people fast enough. They just wanted to make sure they got a lot of just really skilled people in the door. Even if they didn't have jobs for them, that was something that happened right after the pandemic

where big tech companies hired people and didn't even have roles for them, but they wanted to make sure that they had the good people inside their doors. Now, when you hear CEOs and the ways they talk about workers now, it really is kind of a war on that talent where they are just talking tough. They're saying that people need to stop complaining. They need to work harder.

They should be glad they still have jobs. It's a real shift from what we saw just a few years ago. So where did the good times go? Before the pandemic, I don't think that fear was there. It wasn't. And I think it reflects just the state of the labor market right now. Certainly, the job market is still healthy by all indicators, but it's just not as strong as it was.

And we hit in 2023 a 50-year low in the unemployment rate. And so when it was a market where employees just could kind of name their price, they could get big sort of pay raises by jumping to a competitor. They had companies trying to woo them in all sorts of ways. I remember those days. Yes. I mean, it was the great resignation where people just wanted to jump and get something better.

And now certainly in the white collar job market. So these are for those well-paid corporate roles. There's a real cooling happening. It's a lot harder to jump. A lot of workers feel stuck because of that. And talk about that. In your reporting, you take a look at how a lot of job duties are essentially expanding, doing not just one job, but three jobs in one. That's right. We spoke with one job seeker who said that you look at the listings right

now and it's just crazy what one job is asking for. It really could be multiple positions in that single job. And we've heard this from managers too. Companies right now say they want to flatten their ranks. So what that means is pushing out the middle managers but those managers that remain are now having to do the roles of multiple people. What workers say is that companies just want it all right now and they can largely sort of do that. They can get away with it because the job market is cooling. And it's a kind of a tricky time for workers trying to navigate all this and trying to figure out, you know, what can we say if we do complain? Will our bosses even hear us? There's some evidence. No, I mean, there was a recent incident at Uber where the company rolled back its sabbatical policy where up until now the company had given its corporate

employees paid one month sabbatical after five years of the company. Well, it's now going to be eight years and as you can imagine that didn't go over all that well. And where does AI fit in here? You talk about it in your reporting that there's a real fear, perceived or not, that workers will be replaced by AI. Executives are being really explicit about the threat that's coming for employees. And so we saw the CEO of Shopify recently tell employees that the e-commerce company wouldn't hire new people unless they could prove that AI wasn't capable

of doing that job. So that's just showing that like, hey, we're not gonna just add head count here. You have to say that, you know, that AI can't help here. And we had another CEO, this was the CEO of the freelance marketplace Fiverr. He sent a memo last month saying that AI is coming for your jobs.

You know, heck, it's coming from my job too, he wrote. And so he said that those who don't wake up and understand this new reality are unfortunately doomed. What do workers have to look forward to then in terms of a light at the end of the tunnel? One Stanford management professor was talking to me about this and he said, this is actually pretty cyclical. This is what we see in down markets like this. CEOs talk like this.

You see them take a tougher stance, but eventually employees will get their moment in the sun again too. And so when the job market changes, when the economy approves, CEOs are going to be a little kinder, they're going to start talking about workers. That's the talent again. And then workers will be able to take advantage of that. They'll be able to job hop and be able to call their shots once more. When we see that is sort of to

be determined. That's what I was gonna ask. Give me the day. Everybody's looking for that date. I think it just depends on sort of where the economy goes. The point is that labor markets don't stay flat forever. Things could change and workers could get the upper hand once more. Is there any way or anything employees can do to just kind of get ahead of this and be proactive? Part of it is like thinking about in a moment when you might not be able to get a different

job, how can you increase your skills or think about sort of doing something different? And so you see progressive companies thinking a lot about how they can help people just do like sort of rotations into different jobs or take sort of short-term assignments that might give them some new skills, even if you're not going to get a promotion, if it's a new flattened organizational structure where there are fewer chances to promote people. What else could you do to just make yourself more valuable? If you want to go back to school, and we've seen that, we've seen sort of applications up for MBAs and law schools.

But I also just think even if you didn't want to quit your job, if you thought about what could you do internally right now to try to make yourself even more competitive in the job market. So employees are trying to figure out what works right now. I mean, there is a real, like, an undercurrent of misery in the workplace right now. People just, they know this. If bosses are talking about how everybody's expendable, workers feel that and they don't really know what to do.

You can try to buddy up with a boss and you can try to make yourself as just as sort of, like, valuable as possible. Workers have really been rattled by this wave after wave of layoffs inside companies. And so I think everybody's just trying to figure out how do you hold on? How do you keep your skills relevant? How do you survive the coming sort of AI takeover of jobs? And so it's a lot right now. And I think that's why so many workers just have a sense of uncertainty and concern about

what to even do or how to even manage their careers right now. That's Wall Street Journal reporter Chip Cutter. And that's it for your money briefing. This episode was produced by Ariana Asparu with supervising producer Melanie Roy. I'm Derek Dennis for the Wall Street Journal. Thanks for listening. you