Your People Think Loyalty Only Goes One Way, and Hiring Is Picking Up
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9 in 10 workers say their employer expects more loyalty than it gives back. Monster’s Workplace Loyalty Report, published yesterday, puts the number at 90% in a Pollfish survey of 1,020 employed U.S. workers fielded July 17.
Workers think the gap is widening. 46% say companies are less loyal to employees than they were 5 years ago, 28% say employer loyalty is about the same, and 25% say it has improved. 71% say companies care more about profits than employees compared with 5 years ago. Only 4% say the opposite.
Most workers still call themselves loyal. 80% describe themselves as loyal, 31% in the top category and 49% as moderately loyal, and Monster defines moderately loyal as preferring to stay but willing to leave under certain circumstances. The other 20% are already halfway out: 14% would leave if a better opportunity came along, and 6% are actively looking no matter what. Vicki Salemi’s summary of the mood: “For many workers, workplace loyalty has become a one-way street.”
The number I’d focus on is 49%. Half of workers are moderately loyal, meaning they prefer to stay and will listen if the right call comes in. Those are the people who answer a recruiter, and the next section shows more recruiters are about to be calling.
When 9 in 10 people believe the deal is one-sided, they remember everything: a raise that went to a coworker, a promotion that went to an outside hire, a layoff handled badly. The workers who feel shortchanged are the ones whose answer to that recruiter changes. Most of the fix costs little. Tell people where they stand, show them a path forward, and pay them what the market pays before a competitor tells them what they’re worth. Monster’s own advice to employers points in the same direction: growth opportunities, stability, fair treatment, recognition, and support for well-being.
For workers, I agree with Salemi on the other half of this. You can do excellent work for your employer and still be honest with yourself about whether the job is good for your career. In her words, “You can be committed to doing your job well without committing to an employer indefinitely.”
If your retention plan needs a second look before hiring heats up, reach out to us.
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Hiring Has Sped Up 5 Weeks in a Row, and It’s Still Below Early June
ADP’s weekly NER Pulse shows U.S. private employers adding an average of 23,750 jobs per week over the 4 weeks ending September 19. ADP says hiring accelerated for the fifth week in a row, and its own table backs the claim: 10,000 a week in mid-August, then 12,250, 16,750, 20,000, 22,500, and now 23,750.
The late-July low was 8,250 a week for the week ending July 25. The current reading is almost 3 times that bottom and the highest in the 12 weeks ADP published this morning. ADP calls the numbers preliminary and says they could change as new data is added. The series is a seasonally adjusted 4-week moving average on a 2-week lag, and the next update comes October 13.
Keep the context in view. ADP’s September 9 release put the same measure at 30,750 a week for the week ending June 6 and 24,250 for June 13. Five weeks of gains have recovered most of the summer slide, and they have not reached early June yet.
23,750 a week works out to roughly 100,000 jobs a month, using 4.33 weeks per month, against about 36,000 a month at the July low. The pace is close to the 90,000 private jobs ADP’s monthly report showed for September. It’s a solid recovery from the summer and a long way from a hiring boom.
I’d pay attention to 5 straight weeks of faster hiring. A single week can bounce around for all kinds of reasons, and a 4-week average already smooths those out. Five consecutive increases tell me employers who held off in July are filling jobs again.
The loyalty numbers above give that trend its edge. Over a slow summer, a strong candidate might wait 2 weeks for your second interview with nowhere else to go. When hiring picks up, the strongest people start fielding several calls at once, and the window shrinks fast.
If you manage a team, the moderately loyal group is the one to talk to now, before a recruiter does. If you’re job hunting, this fall is shaping up better than the summer, and the time to get in front of employers is before year-end budgets lock up.
Robots Could Do 34% of U.S. Work Hours, and Price Keeps Them Out of Most of It
Anthropic’s economics team, Russell Legate-Yang and Maxim Massenkoff, built a robot exposure index that scores each job by how much of its work today’s robots can do. The index counts only demonstrated robots, meaning ones already deployed, sold, or shown working.
By that measure, robots can already do 74% of physical tasks in the U.S., which adds up to 34% of all working hours. Most of that work happens in controlled settings like factories and warehouses. In open, unpredictable places like city roads, robots handle just 2% of physical tasks, and those often involve driving.
Add AI chatbots and the exposure grows. LLMs alone cover about half of all job tasks, and LLMs plus robots expose about 81%. Robots lift transportation and moving tasks from under 15% exposed to about 90%. Anthropic sells AI models, which the report also measures, so read the chatbot figures with that in mind. The robot cost analysis stands on its own.
Cost is the catch. The report finds robots cost-competitive with people for just 0.3% of job tasks. Robot prices have fallen roughly 3% a year since the 1990s, and at that pace the authors put the wait at around 40 years before robots are cost-competitive for even 10% of work.
The jobs closest to the line are easy to name. 9 of the 10 most exposed occupations involve driving a vehicle, and taxi drivers rank highest at 2.2 on a 3-point scale. Packers and packagers are the largest occupation where robots already pencil out. The U.S. employs about 560,000 of them, down 22% since 2015, and a robot setup costs about $2,500 a year less than a packer paid around $49,000. Robotaxis cost about $7,000 a year more than a taxi driver, and regulation is the main brake. For welders, robots cost around 5 times as much as a person, and cleaning robots are several times more expensive than janitors and dishwashers.
The workers in the most exposed jobs have the least cushion. They’re paid about $30 an hour less than workers in unexposed jobs, they’re 55 percentage points less likely to hold a bachelor’s degree, and their unemployment rate is more than twice as high.
The safest work is hands-on and face-to-face: nursing, repair, personal care, and social services. Dexterity is the biggest barrier for robots, with half of physical tasks out of reach until they handle objects better. Regulation blocks robots from 14% of physical tasks, and people’s preferences hold them back on about a quarter. The researchers tested the index against 50 years of history and found that since 1977, jobs more exposed to existing robots saw bigger drops in wages and employment, while robots have learned about 2% more of the physical work they couldn’t do each year. In the authors’ words: “If the past is any guide, taxi drivers and warehouse packers will see changes sooner than nurses and mechanics.”
I read this one twice because the headline number and the real story point in different directions. Robots can technically do work that adds up to a third of all U.S. working hours, and they cost less than a person for 0.3% of it. For now, price is what protects most physical jobs.
I’d watch the jobs where the math is already close. A packer costs an employer about $49,000 a year, and a robot setup costs $2,500 less. Robotaxis sit only $7,000 a year above a driver, with regulation holding them back. When the gap is that small, one cheaper part or one new state law can change a company’s hiring plan quickly. If I ran a warehouse or a fleet, I’d start cross-training people now for the work robots still can’t do, like quality checks, maintenance, and handling the exceptions the machines get wrong.
Anyone choosing a career should notice what sits at the bottom of the exposure list. Nursing, repair, and the skilled trades are hands-on and face-to-face, and they remain the hardest jobs for robots or AI to do. Anthropic’s September scenario model for AI and jobs pointed in the same direction on where workers may end up. If your warehouse, fleet, or packaging operation is planning for what’s coming, explore our staffing services.
