The Bargain That Changed
Even the columnists who never side with unions are starting to notice
A conservative columnist in Quebec wrote something this week that surprised me.
Mario Dumont — a former leader of a right-leaning provincial party, a reliable critic of union demands for most of his career — published a column admitting that on the current return-to-office fight in the Quebec public service, the unions have a point.
Not that remote work is a right. He’s explicit that it isn’t. He’s fine with employers mandating presence when presence matters. His concession is narrower and sharper: he can’t defend what the unions have started calling téléprésentiel — the practice of requiring employees to physically come into the office to spend their day in video calls on the same laptop they’d use at home, in a grey cubicle, with the same blurred background they’d have in their kitchen.
That, Dumont writes, is l’illogisme parfait en gestion. Perfect managerial illogic. Doing something that cannot be explained and cannot be justified, done purely because a boss has instructed it to be done.
He’s right. And I think he’s underestimating how big the problem actually is.
One Insight
The thing most employers are still trying to purchase — compliance from capable people who can’t be coherently told why — is no longer for sale.
The return-to-office debate has been allowed to drift into the wrong question. The debate that dominates airtime is “is remote work more or less productive than in-office work?” — and the evidence on that question is contested, politicized, and frankly, beside the point. Both sides of that argument have cherry-picked studies. Nobody wins it.
The real debate is different. It’s the debate organizations haven’t yet had the courage to have out loud:
The relationship between employer and employee has structurally changed. The old contract — I pay you, you do what you’re told — has quietly been replaced by something else. And a large fraction of employers either haven’t noticed, or are pretending not to.
The new contract, whether anyone has formally signed it or not, is closer to this: I will contribute meaningfully to your organization. In return, you will respect me enough to explain what you ask of me.
That shift isn’t moral. It’s structural. Three forces have made it so, and none of them are reversing.
What Changed — Three Forces
Information symmetry. A generation ago, an employer knew what the labor market would bear and the employee didn’t. That asymmetry was the foundation of unilateral authority. It’s gone. An employee with a smartphone now knows, in under a minute, what comparable roles pay elsewhere, what other organizations offer in terms of flexibility, and what their own skills are worth on the open market. The informational moat that gave employers pricing power has evaporated.
Individual leverage. The same technological wave that gave employees information also gave them capability. A competent person with modern tools — AI assistants, cloud software, communication platforms, payment infrastructure — can now produce at a scale that used to require an entire department. The employer’s old claim of “you need our infrastructure to do this work” is dissolving in real time. The capable employee no longer needs the employer as much as the employer needs the capable employee.
Meaning as a requirement. This one is the least quantifiable and the most important. Capable employees — the ones with options — have stopped treating their work as a pure exchange of time for money. They increasingly refuse to be instruments of directives they can’t be shown the logic of. Not out of entitlement. Because the cost of meaningless compliance has become visible to them in a way it wasn’t to previous generations. They watched their parents burn out inside systems that never justified themselves, and they’ve decided they’re not doing the same.
Put those three together, and you get a capable employee who knows what they’re worth, has the tools to go elsewhere, and will no longer accept “because I said so” as a coherent answer.
That employee is not being difficult. They’re being awake.
What the Research Actually Shows
The consequences of failing to notice this shift are not abstract. They are measurable, and the numbers are worse than most executives realize.
A 2024 Gartner survey of more than 2,000 office workers found that, when a return-to-office mandate is imposed, the average employee’s intent to stay drops 8%. Among high performers, it drops 16% — twice as much. The best employees read the signal first, and they read it loudest.
A separate 2024 study from the University of Pittsburgh (Ding, Ma et al.) tracked over three million workers across S&P 500 tech and finance firms using LinkedIn employment histories. After return-to-office mandates, turnover rose 14% overall. Among highly skilled employees, the increase was 18%. Among mid- and senior-level managers, 19%. Women were disproportionately likely to leave. Time-to-fill on vacant positions rose 23%. Hire rates dropped 17%.
The replacement cost of each of those departures, according to SHRM and Gallup data, runs between 50% and 200% of annual salary — up to 213% for senior roles. The majority of that cost is invisible: institutional knowledge that walks out the door, project continuity that breaks, teammates who disengage after watching valued colleagues leave, customers who feel the difference without being able to name it.
Roughly 80% of companies that implemented return-to-office mandates have already lost talent because of them.
Here is the pattern hiding inside those numbers: organizations that cannot translate the logic of their own directives to their own people are losing exactly the people they most need to keep — and replacing them more slowly, at greater cost, with candidates who are harder to attract.
That is not a staffing problem. It is not an HR problem. It is a structural admission that the organization is operating under the old contract while its best people are operating under the new one.
The Admission Underneath
The most honest data point in the entire research base isn’t a turnover number. It’s this: a measurable fraction of executives — around 25% in surveys — have openly admitted that they hoped return-to-office mandates would cause voluntary resignations, reducing headcount without the legal cost of layoffs. In the United States, the new federal administration’s Department of Government Efficiency said this explicitly about the federal workforce.
In other words, a meaningful share of organizations are not confused about the effect. They are counting on the effect. They are using incoherence as an exit mechanism — making the workplace sufficiently illogical that people will quit rather than comply, and thereby avoiding severance costs.
The problem is that the strategy succeeds on its own terms and fails on every other term. It produces exits, yes. But it produces the wrong exits. The people with the most options — the most capable, the most senior, the most skilled — are the ones who can most easily leave, and do. The people who stay are the ones who have nowhere else to go.
An organization that runs this play for several years ends up with a workforce filtered for limited options. That’s a specific kind of institutional decline, and it’s very hard to reverse.
The Organizations That Think They’re Safe
Every large, stable institution reading this — public sector bodies, regulated industries, legacy corporations — is likely telling itself some version of “this doesn’t fully apply to us.” The buffer of pensions, job security, grade-based salary scales, and political sensitivity around restructuring creates real insulation from the dynamics described above.
That insulation is shrinking. Faster than most of those organizations realize.
The employees inside those institutions are not unaware of what they’d earn or build outside. The AI wave is quietly redesigning which roles actually require a team and which don’t. The incoming generation has less tolerance for hierarchical incoherence than any generation before it, and they are not absorbing the old contract because the old contract no longer fits the reality they see.
Institutional insulation does for employers roughly what monopolies do for their customers: it allows behaviors that would be fatal elsewhere, right up until the moat disappears. When the moat disappears, the accumulated dysfunction becomes visible all at once.
The organizations that are going to navigate the next decade well are the ones who start operating under the new contract before they’re forced to. The ones who refuse will experience the transition as a series of bewildering losses — capable people leaving, vacancies stretching, replacement hires underperforming — and they will, predictably, blame the labor market.
The Pitch That No Longer Works
There is another dimension of this shift that employers haven’t fully absorbed, and it may be the most important one.
A generation ago, the decision to take a job was, for most people, structurally forced. You needed an employer. You needed the infrastructure, the payroll, the benefits administration, the access to tools and clients and supply chains that an individual could not assemble alone. The employer’s pitch was simple because it didn’t have to be sophisticated: we are the path to a paycheck, and there is no other viable path for most of you.
That is no longer true.
Anyone competent and motivated can now become an entrepreneur, a consultant, a freelancer, a solo operator — with infrastructure that used to cost millions now available for tens of dollars a month. Payment processing, accounting software, AI assistants, client acquisition platforms, contract templates, cloud computing, communication tools. The barriers that used to force capable people into traditional employment have collapsed, and the collapse is accelerating.
This means the employer’s pitch — the actual value proposition a job offers — has to be genuinely competitive against self-employment for the first time in modern history. Not rhetorically. Actually.
And here’s what capable employees are evaluating the pitch against:
The paycheck alone isn’t enough anymore. A capable person can generate comparable income independently, with enough effort, and they know it. The paycheck is still necessary but no longer sufficient to justify showing up.
What the job now has to offer is everything the paycheck was bundled with and nobody bothered to price. Life balance. Peace of mind. Predictable income without client acquisition stress. A team to think with. Benefits that would cost a fortune to replicate privately. The feeling of being cared for by an organization that sees you as a person rather than a resource. Work that fits inside a life rather than consuming it.
These are not perks. They are not nice-to-haves. They are the core of what a job now has to deliver to justify the tradeoff against independence. An employer who offers only a paycheck is now competing — whether they realize it or not — against the employee’s ability to generate that same paycheck alone, under conditions they can control.
And on every non-paycheck dimension, a capable person working independently wins by default. They set their own hours, choose their own projects, work from wherever they want, take breaks when they need them, and answer to nobody who cannot justify themselves. The employer has to actively offer something better than that to win.
Most employers are still pitching 1995.
Where Innovation Will Happen
This has consequences far beyond individual retention numbers.
The capable people who leave organizations that can’t explain themselves are not disappearing. They are going somewhere. Increasingly, that somewhere is either a competitor who has figured out the new contract — or their own independent operation, where they can work on problems they care about, on terms they choose.
That means the innovation that used to happen inside large organizations is increasingly happening outside them. The most capable, most curious, most entrepreneurial employees are the ones who leave first and go independent soonest. They take their ideas, their judgment, their networks, and their willingness to try things with them.
Organizations that continue to operate as if their scale and infrastructure are automatic advantages are going to discover, slowly and then all at once, that the advantage has flipped. Small, agile, well-led operations staffed by people who chose to be there will outcompete large, incoherent organizations staffed by people who stayed because they couldn’t leave.
That is already happening in software. It is starting to happen in consulting, media, finance, and creative industries. It will happen in every knowledge-work sector where individual competence plus modern tools can match what an organization once uniquely provided.
The employers who recognize this early will pivot their value proposition — not toward higher salaries, but toward the genuine offer of a life that actually works. The ones who don’t will watch their most capable people leave to build what the organization should have been building, using infrastructure the organization no longer uniquely owns.
Innovation doesn’t stop. It just relocates.
The Question Every Leader Should Be Able to Answer
Here is the single test I would offer to any executive considering a directive — a return-to-office mandate, a surveillance policy, a process change, a reorganization:
Can I articulate, without invoking my authority, why what I am asking makes sense?
Not: is it within my prerogative? It almost certainly is. Not: am I legally entitled? Presumably yes. Not: do I have the right to require it? You do.
The test is: can I explain it to a capable adult in a way that respects their judgment and their time?
If the answer is no, the directive probably shouldn’t exist. It is costing more than it yields. If the answer is yes, it needs to be said out loud, in those terms, to the people affected. Every time. In a voice that acknowledges their contribution rather than assumes their compliance.
That shift — from authority as justification to coherence as justification — is not a soft management trend. It is the only kind of management that still works on people who have somewhere else to go. And that category of people is growing, not shrinking.
One Final Observation
When a conservative columnist admits the unions have a point, the moment is worth marking. Not because either side has won a political argument. Because the absurdity has become visible enough that even observers disinclined to agree have to concede it.
That is usually what happens just before a broader consensus forms. Someone unexpected says the thing, and the conversation shifts.
I suspect we are in one of those moments. The employment bargain has changed. A growing share of capable people already know it, and a growing share of employers are about to find out, whichever way they learn it.
The ones who learn it early will keep their best people. The ones who learn it late will spend the next decade wondering where everyone went.
If this resonated, consider sharing it with someone who leads people — or someone quietly deciding whether to stay inside an organization that can no longer explain itself.