Honest Employers, Real Value

By Kenneth Ferraro

Hiring managers keep searching for the wrong signals. They pore over résumés, dismissing candidates as “not a fit,” as if a neat row of job titles predicts loyalty. But a résumé isn’t a culture test. It’s the record of someone searching for a job that can sustain a life — and by extension, an identity. For generations, identity meant being able to support yourself and your family. Work was the anchor of adulthood not because it was glamorous, but because it delivered stability.

That deal is broken, and employers broke it. Wages have stagnated while the costs of everything essential have surged. In 1995, the median U.S. home cost about $114,600 while median household income was $34,076 — roughly 3.4 times earnings (National Association of Realtors; U.S. Census Bureau). Today the median home is over $410,000 against income of $83,730 — nearly five times (NAR; Census). Housing isn’t the outlier; it’s the model. Child care, groceries, tuition, health insurance: all have ballooned faster than wages. A dollar of income buys less life today than it did a generation ago. The math is blunt: a paycheck that once built stability now barely covers survival.

It wasn’t always like this. In the postwar decades, companies offered pensions, health coverage, and wages that could support a single-income household. Factories and offices weren’t glamorous, but they offered a coherent bargain. In return, workers gave loyalty, overtime, and the occasional sacrifice of family time. The slogans about team spirit may have been hokey, but they weren’t fraudulent, because the paycheck sustained the lives they were meant to celebrate.

That foundation cracked as layoffs and outsourcing became Wall Street’s favorite efficiency tricks. Pensions vanished. Health benefits were chipped away. Stable jobs were shipped overseas while the workers left behind were told to smile through “culture.” Employers cut the deal, and workers lived with the fallout.

What’s really been lost isn’t just stability — it’s identity. For generations, a person’s sense of self was tied to their ability to provide: to keep a roof overhead, food on the table, and a future in sight. Now, with that anchor cut loose, people search for identity elsewhere — and often drag that search into the workplace itself. That’s why TikTok videos, content creation, and endless posting creep into the workday. Workers are filling gaps that wages no longer fill. What looks like distraction is really substitution — trying to patch an identity that used to be secured by stability.

Executives still talk as if nothing’s changed. Retail chains call workers “family” while trimming hours to the bone. Coffee companies rebrand baristas as “partners” even as they spend millions fighting organizing drives (NLRB filings). Tech firms host lavish culture retreats, then announce mass layoffs by email the following quarter (The New York Times, 2023). This isn’t just history repeating — it’s today’s headlines. Union election petitions have surged to levels not seen in decades (NLRB data), and housing affordability has fallen to lows not experienced since the 1980s (Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies).

So what happens? Workers adapt. A warehouse employee juggles two jobs and scrolls his phone at the first one because he’s too exhausted to care. A nurse picks up travel contracts and bounces between hospitals because the pay differential keeps her family afloat. A young professional treats every role like a pit stop, leaving after 18 months, because staying is financial suicide. You can call it apathy. But it’s rational. When work no longer sustains life, unmet needs don’t vanish — they creep into the workplace.

Meanwhile, companies double down on theater. Job ads are stuffed with buzzwords like innovation and flexibility. Interviews obsess over “fit” and “values.” Office walls scream teamwork and passion. But when employees walk outside, the bills waiting at home are louder. Workers know they aren’t trading hours for slogans. They’re trading hours for the lifestyle those hours can buy. And if the paycheck doesn’t cover stability and dignity, the slogans aren’t just meaningless. They’re insulting.

This is why “quiet quitting” isn’t laziness. It’s feedback. Job-hopping isn’t immaturity. It’s a survival strategy. Workers are saying, without words, that the exchange has collapsed.

Here’s where employers compound the failure: by clinging to the myth of “fit.” They treat résumés like divining rods, as if one more internship or credential is what makes a candidate worthy. And if you’re the one tossing résumés with “not a fit” scribbled in the margin, ask yourself: fit for what? Your slogans, or their survival? Any job can be a fit if it sustains stability. For decades, people gave loyalty to companies that didn’t deserve it because the paychecks did. Loyalty didn’t come from posters. It came from mortgages paid, children raised, families supported.

So let’s stop pretending the challenge is how to make workers passionate about the logo. The challenge is whether employers can accept their real role: not as stand-in families or meaning-makers, but as facilitators of lifestyle. That means wages that let the average worker live an average life without debt. It means schedules that respect health and family time. It means benefits that cover real needs — family leave, education stipends, reliable health coverage — not ping-pong tables and pizza parties. It also means offering pathways to identity that companies can never supply themselves: time to raise families, engage in community, pursue education, or create something of their own.

When the “give” finally matches the “get,” loyalty follows naturally. Not because employees are hypnotized by corporate messaging, but because the job underwrites the lives they’re trying to build. Honest employers stop pretending to be the meaning of work and start creating the conditions for employees to live meaningful lives outside it. That shift — from passion demanded to value aligned — is the only way to rebuild trust, productivity and long-term commitment.

The misnomer of money no longer fools anyone. Workers don’t labor for raw dollars; they labor for lifestyle, for identity. Until hiring managers, HR leaders and executives take that truth seriously, culture will stay hollow, slogans will keep falling flat, and résumés will keep being tossed aside with “not a fit.” The companies that thrive won’t be the ones who master culture theater. They’ll be the ones that admit the deal is broken, stop policing résumés for chemistry, and start paying for reality.