The workplace hasn’t disappeared, but the way we work within it is changing.
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For most of the last century, the deal between employer and employee was simple. You gave years, often decades, of work. The company, in return, offered something beyond a paycheck: structure, continuity, and a path toward a retirement you could actually count on. It was never a perfect arrangement, but it was legible. Both sides knew the terms.
Today, those terms are becoming harder to recognize.
The headlines this spring are filled with layoffs justified by familiar reasons. Meta laid off hundreds of workers. Oracle is reportedly considering thousands more to support data center expansion. Atlassian cut 10% of its staff while restructuring around artificial intelligence. Block laid off 4,000 employees, roughly 40% of its workforce, in February. According to a report from career transition firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, AI has been cited as the reason behind about 92,000 job cuts at U.S.-based companies since 2023, with nearly two-thirds of those occurring in 2025.
Maybe.
Beyond the headlines, something more significant is emerging. Many of these same companies are rehiring, often quickly and frequently for similar roles, just not under the same conditions.
A survey by Robert Half found that 55% of hiring managers plan to increase their use of contract or temporary workers in the first half of 2026. Advisory firm Gartner predicts that approximately 50% of companies that cut customer service staff and blame AI will look to rehire for similar roles within a year.
This isn't just a story about layoffs; it's about the slowly evolving shift in the work and retirement agreement between employer and employee.
The evolution of retirement in America over the last five-plus decades can be told in three chapters.
The first was the pension, the defined benefit plan. Your employer promised to fund, manage, and deliver it. The risk was on the company's balance sheet. You showed up, stayed, and retirement more or less arrived on schedule. Your life after work was, at least financially, predictable.
The second chapter was the 401(k), the defined contribution plan. Introduced in the early 1980s, it was marketed as a way to empower workers: they could now control their own retirement futures. What was hidden in that message was the extent of the transfer and a shift of responsibilities and risks.
Workers needed discipline to make consistent contributions. Smart allocations. Decades of patience. Everything was now entirely your responsibility to manage. The structure of long-term employment at least made that feasible. A decades-long career still provided the runway.
The third chapter has no clean name yet. Call it defined uncertainty. We are not merely shifting responsibility again. We have begun dismantling the employment structure, effectively an unspoken social contract between employee and employer, that made responsibility bearable in the first place.
Managing a career now also means managing everything that used to come with it.
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The shift toward “contingent work” has been building for decades, but the pace is accelerating. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics uses a narrow definition of contingent work, those without an expectation of continued employment, and estimates it at roughly 4% of the workforce. But broader measures that include independent contractors, gig workers, and temporary staff put the figure closer to 40%. MBO Partners, a talent platform, estimates that 73 million Americans now work as independents.
The difference is more than wording and counting; it matters enormously for retirement.
Full-time employees receive 401(k) matching contributions, access to group health insurance, unemployment insurance, and stock options. Contract workers receive none of those things as a matter of course. They bear the full cost of their own healthcare, fund their retirement entirely from their own income, and have no safety net between engagements.
Freelance platform Upwork reports that 77% of business leaders say the AI era is increasing their need to hire contract workers with specialized skills. The companies get flexibility. The workers get invoices.
However, this is not a story of employers alone driving change. According to Robert Half, workers themselves, at every stage of life, are asking for more flexibility in when, where, and how they work. Surveys consistently show that flexibility now ranks alongside pay in shaping decisions about where to work and whether to stay.
This is not a technology story. It is a new employer-employee relationship story being told as a technology story.
One temptation is to treat this as a Silicon Valley strategy unique to tech, but the restructuring of the employer-employee relationship goes well beyond the Valley.
In healthcare, roughly 7% to 8% of physicians now work in locum tenens arrangements, that is, temporary placements that offer high hourly rates and no long-term benefits, according to CHG Healthcare. Approximately 1.6 million healthcare workers operate as temporary or contract staff, per data from AMN Healthcare. Across industries, surveys show that 41% of companies plan to increase their use of contingent workers over the next several years. Even law firms, once a mainstay of time and tradition, are hiring more interim lawyers and contract professionals.
Whether you wear a hard hat, a white coat, carry a briefcase, or a hoodie, the structure of work is becoming less continuous. And retirement, which was designed around continuous careers, has not been redesigned to accommodate the shift.
For 40 years, the financial services industry, with genuine good intentions and an impressive suite of tools and technologies, told workers to take responsibility for their retirement. Maximize your contributions. Monitor your progress. Diversify your portfolio. Start early. Stay the course. Manage the long term.
What went unsaid was the assumption buried underneath all of that advice: that you would have a stable employer, a consistent income, ongoing matching contributions, and decades of uninterrupted accumulation to work with. The advice was sound.
But…the underlying assumption is eroding.
The worker who gets laid off at 52 spends a year searching and returns to their former employer often with a lower title and less pay. This is a pattern documented in recent reporting on Microsoft's workforce restructuring. This employee does not have a savings problem. They have a structural problem that no amount of financial literacy will solve.
Work is no longer designed to carry you to retirement. And retirement has not yet been redesigned to carry you without it.
That gap, between the system we built and the workforce we now have, is where millions of Americans are quietly falling. The policy conversation is lagging. The financial planning conversation is catching up, but slowly. The corporate conversation is prioritizing navigating rapid changes in everything from technology to geopolitical flux.
AI may or may not transform productivity in the ways its promoters promise. What it has already done is give companies a clean narrative for a restructuring they were pursuing anyway. Effectively, a new employer-employee contract that trades long-term employment relationships for short-term flexibility.
From pensions to 401(k)s to good luck. The direction of travel has been consistent. The only question now is how many people will reach retirement age before we decide to change how we prepare for retirement under the newly evolving rules of work.
It would be easy to read the evolving roles of employers or of the financial services industry as a shirking of responsibility or a failure. It is neither.
Each shift, from pensions to 401(k)s to today’s more fragmented labor market, was a response to economic, regulatory, competitive, or technological change. Employers adapted. Financial firms built tools, platforms, and advice models that helped millions navigate that shift. Advisors, providers, and plan sponsors did what the system asked them to do.
The challenge is that the system itself has changed again.
That creates not just a problem, but an opportunity.
An opportunity to rethink how retirement is designed in a world where income is intermittent, careers are episodic, employees themselves are demanding flexibility to come in and out of the full-time workforce, and benefits are no longer anchored to a single employer.
This is an opportunity for financial services firms to expand the conversation beyond accumulation to continuity, that is, how people sustain progress across disruption. And an opportunity for workers themselves to recognize that navigating a longer life will require a different kind of engagement, one that is more active, more informed, and, at times, more independent than any previous generation.
The next chapter of retirement will not be written by any single institution.
It will be built, with intention, by a system that ultimately reflects how people actually work and how long they will live.
Because we didn’t set out to redesign retirement this way. But now that we have, we have to decide what comes next by design, not by default.
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