Revenge of the C-Suite: How Employers Are Getting Their Sweet, Silent Payback
Workers had the power in 2022. In 2025, the C-Suite is taking it back with layoffs, RTO mandates, and AI. Is this corporate revenge?
Mid-2021 to late 2022 was a strange moment in corporate history. Workers had leverage, and they used it.
You asked for raises, and you expected them.
Remote work was the baseline.
Entire companies reshaped themselves to keep their best people from jumping ship.
HR was less a department and more a concierge service.
Even the most average employee briefly felt like the main character.
Fast forward to 2025 and the mood is… different. No one’s offering you stock options on a second Zoom call. You’re being summoned back to the office like a child called in from recess, and if you decline, well, there’s always someone in another time zone willing to do your job for less.
The phrase “economic uncertainty” now appears in press releases like seasoning. Layoffs arrive quietly, then suddenly. Performance reviews are stricter. Hiring budgets have vanished. And the once-empowered employee has been recast as a liability with opinions.
What we’re seeing is a settling of scores. A recalibration, sure. But also a message. Your brief moment in charge was noted. And now, it’s being corrected.
The Brief Reign of the Worker
In the aftermath of pandemic lockdowns, something unthinkable happened: workers gained real leverage. Across industries and borders, employers were outnumbered, outgunned, and worst of all, out-negotiated. It was 2022 and employees were asking for more, and getting it.
Job openings outpaced jobseekers. Inflation hit numbers not seen since shoulder pads were fashionable. HR scrambled. Retention bonuses were invented on the fly. Raises came mid-cycle. Companies were offering remote work like candy. Not because they wanted to, but because they had to. For a fleeting moment, the labor market belonged to labor.
Germany’s industrial unions locked in eye-watering deals.
Japan’s workers saw pay increases their parents had only dreamed of.
Indonesia’s government, despite mumbling about fiscal caution, approved wage hikes across the country.
In the US, quitting your job wasn’t a risk. It was a flex.
Beneath the surface, executives were seething. Shareholders were twitching. The whole thing felt... wrong. For decades, the system had been humming along smoothly: minimize costs, maximize return, avoid giving the help too much hope. But now, workers were acting like stakeholders. Like they mattered.
That made leadership deeply uncomfortable. The system wasn’t built for this. Their tidy, scalable order had been disrupted. The minions had started talking back.
The Empire Strikes Back: “Return to the Office or Else”
By 2023, the corporate patience for pajama productivity had worn thin. The same executives who once promised “remote forever” were now walking that back with a nervous smile. At first, it was all soft language.
“We miss you.”
“Let’s reconnect in person.”
“There’s free coffee.”
Then came a hard pivot to mandates dressed up as morale boosters.
And the masks came off quickly.
“Three days a week or we’ll assume you’ve resigned.”
The HR-speak and consequences got sharper. What began as a “collaboration opportunity” turned into a compliance metric.
The reasons given were predictable: culture, innovation, engagement. But if this was truly about collaboration, someone might have fixed the broken conference room speaker or stopped scheduling team-building sessions during lunch. No, this wasn’t about culture. It was about control.
The reality is that return-to-office mandates were a pressure valve. A strategic purge without the headlines. Internal data and external studies alike revealed the uncomfortable truth: many companies were hoping employees would walk out voluntarily rather than be pushed. Especially the expensive ones. Especially the ones who had the gall to negotiate aggressively during 2022.
For those in charge, RTO became the perfect scalpel. Clean. Quiet. Deniable. No layoffs needed, just attrition. Those who resisted were labeled “non-compliant.” Those who stayed got the message.
It was about reminding you who decides. And it wasn’t Karen in ops with her flexible schedule and her golden retriever rescue blog. It was leadership. And they were done pretending they liked this whole remote empowerment thing.
The Layoff Lottery: Downsizing While Profits Soar
The layoffs of 2024 and 2025 have a certain mystery about them. Not in a whodunit sense. We know exactly who is doing the cutting. The mystery lies in the why.
Companies are pulling in healthy profits.
The stock market is grinning.
Dividends are flowing like champagne at a board retreat.
Yet employees are being shown the door in droves, cardboard box in hand, confused as to what just hit them.
Leaders cite “macro headwinds,” “strategic realignment,” or the ever-mysterious “future readiness.” But under all that jargon is a more honest, much pettier truth. These cuts aren’t just financial. They’re emotional. They’re personal.
Executives haven’t forgotten the indignity of 2022. The sudden, uncomfortable experience of begging workers to stay. Of being ghosted by mid-level analysts. Of handing out 10 percent raises. It was expensive and humiliating.
Now, with the upper hand restored, they’re righting that imbalance. And doing it while boosting earnings per share is just the icing. Headcount reduction has become a sort of corporate flex. A way to prove you’ve “optimized” without doing anything remotely innovative.
And let’s not forget AI. Who needs two interns and a manager when ChatGPT can hallucinate a mediocre PowerPoint for you? The narrative writes itself. The job was “transformed.” The person was “reskilled into the marketplace.”
It’s a layoff lottery out there. And the house always wins.
AI to the Rescue: The Perfect Scapegoat for a Mass Firing
Artificial Intelligence was once billed as the next great enabler of human productivity. Employees explored it with curiosity. They signed up for workshops, posted their AI-assisted to-do lists, and created decks about “unlocking efficiency at scale.” In hindsight, it was like enthusiastically helping to build the guillotine.
Because now, in 2025, AI is doing something far more impactful than summarizing meeting notes. It’s replacing people. Quietly. Systematically. And with the kind of clean, technocratic spin that avoids headlines or lawsuits.
The new corporate strategy is simple: blame the algorithm. When entire teams vanish, it’s not framed as downsizing. It’s transformation. No one was fired. They were outpaced by innovation. If you listen closely during investor calls, you’ll hear phrases like “automated pipeline restructuring,” which translates roughly to: the marketing team is gone and no one wants to talk about it.
What makes this moment especially convenient for executives is that AI comes with built-in deniability. No individual is singled out. No one is told they were underperforming. You were simply caught in the crossfire of progress. Neat, fast, and utterly impersonal.
AI streamlined operations and helped reestablish the balance of power. Workers got too confident in 2022. Too loud. Too flexible. Now they’re being reminded that any task that can be reduced to a workflow will eventually be handed to a machine that doesn’t need benefits, opinions, or daylight.
You helped train it.
You fed it prompts.
You gave it examples.
AI learned from you, then filed your termination under “efficiency gains.”
The brief worker renaissance of 2022 is over, filed neatly in corporate memory under “that one time we lost control.” Raises have slowed, hiring is hesitant, and remote work has been rebranded from a right to a reward. If you blinked, you might have missed the moment when it felt like things had truly shifted. When employees had leverage. When companies begged, not demanded.
Now, the system runs smoother, leaner, colder. The people in charge have not forgotten the chaos of wage negotiations, staff shortages, or the dreaded phrase “flexible work expectations.” And they’ve spent the last two years correcting the record.
Every layoff justified by AI, every salary frozen in the name of “cost discipline,” every RTO mandate dressed up as “team cohesion,” it all sings the same tune. One designed to remind you that power may have briefly changed hands, but it was never meant to stay there.
Still, if you keep your head down, keep smiling during forced office socials, and avoid saying the word “raise” above a whisper, you might survive the purge.
And if you do, congratulations. You’ve earned what every modern worker dreams of. Not a promotion, not a raise… but continued employment.
At StratEx - Indonesia Business Advisory we help professionals future-proof their careers in a system quietly rewriting the rules. Contact us to stay relevant, sharp, and one step ahead.