This is more than a backlash to DEI or ESG. It’s more than whether a remote or flexible workplace is the most productive. And it’s more than a market correction for a period when wages, and inflation, briefly sent economic historians back to their textbooks about the serial crises of the 1970s.

This is about employers clawing power back from labor. It’s about payback—for overreach by workers who forgot who was really in charge. It’s about social class, a reminder that some people are haves and others have not. More than anything, it’s about resentment.

Putting a lid on wages

During the pandemic era, especially between 2021 and mid-2023, companies scrambling to fill roles competed with eye-popping wage bumps. Employees switching jobs regularly saw salary hikes of around 16%, particularly in sectors like hospitality and retail. Job postings advertised unprecedented pay, and workers seized on their newfound leverage, often quitting roles in droves to pursue better offers—a phenomenon that became known as the Great Resignation.

But as the dust has settled, the labor pendulum has begun swinging back. With demand cooling and layoffs mounting through 2024, negotiating power is shifting back toward employers. According to a 2023 ZipRecruiter report, nearly half of US companies surveyed admitted to lowering advertised wages for certain roles, justifying the reductions as a reset following the hiring frenzy of prior years.

The tightening labor market, marked by fewer job openings and rising unemployment, has left employees with reduced leverage—and bosses with the upper hand.

Return-to-office is discipline disguised as policy

Perhaps the most visible expression of employer revenge is the sweeping return-to-office (RTO) mandates. What began as a gradual shift in late 2023 has, in 2025, hardened into uncompromising policies. CEOs insist on five-day in-office workweeks; workers who resist face discipline or termination. While some companies cite collaboration and productivity, it really serves a different purpose.

Research confirms what many workers suspected: for some employers, RTO is a thinly veiled headcount reduction. Executives know that forcing remote staff back into rigid office settings will prompt resignations, thus shrinking payroll without overt layoffs. This tactic has disproportionately affected employees who thrived under pandemic-era flexibility, and is widely viewed by labor advocates as retribution for years of worker autonomy.

Pay cuts and ‘adjustments’: rolling back the clock

Beyond RTO, companies are quietly rolling back pandemic-era pay raises. Industries hardest hit by the Great Resignation—hospitality, retail, healthcare—have begun to freeze wages or implement graduated pay cuts. Perhaps CEOs are lashing out because they aren’t so safe themselves: Turnover in the top job hit a five-year high in 2023 and has stayed escalated since. Employment consultant Challenger, Gray & Christmas dubbed 2025 the start of the “CEO gig economy.”

Some firms justify reductions by claiming wage growth exceeded inflation, while others simply cite the need to reset compensation to pre-pandemic norms. The result: Workers hired in the boom now find themselves faced with smaller paychecks for the same jobs, if they’re lucky enough to keep those jobs at all.

Employee backlash: revenge quitting on the rise

This “big payback” hasn’t gone unanswered. Discontented workers, especially Gen Z and millennials, are fueling a new trend: “revenge quitting.” Unlike “quiet quitting” or “slow disengagement,” revenge quitting is abrupt and often timed to inflict maximum disruption, such as during critical business periods.

There’s also anecdotal evidence of “revenge RTO“: workers acting up in all kinds of small ways to quietly protest the increasingly top-down work environment they have been thrust back into. Reddit’s AntiWork forum has a whole thread documenting (and brainstorming) “subtle acts of resistance.” The boss may have ordered workers back, but they can choose to never answer their phone in the office, over-socializing, or even intentionally burning popcorn in the microwave.

In fact, the workplace in the mid-2020s resembles nothing so much as a jungle, with all sorts of different worker fauna, adapted in various ways to dodge the great resentment wave. Take the emergence of the “coffee badger,” a worker who swipes their badge to get into the office just long enough to have some facetime with colleagues, likely making sure their boss sees them, have a cup of office coffee, and scramble back home. The coffee badger is a millennial species, as midcareer workers have often settled into a groove of years of remote work and they don’t like emerging from their hole as much as Gen Z, who is surprisingly eager for in-person mentorship and old-school office vibes.

The CEOs brimming with resentment over loss of status and power may be enjoying their moment of revenge, but they should stay attuned to all the emerging species of office sloths. Resentment, after all, is a two-way street, and it’s a jungle out there.