Why the employer-employee relationship carries more weight than it can possibly hold.

This is the first post in a series about The Social Contract, the unspoken obligations between organizations and their people.

There is an unspoken agreement at the center of most people’s working lives. Show up, do good work, and in return receive not just a paycheck but stability — healthcare, retirement, paid leave, a sense that you are taken care of. For Americans, that agreement is about survival. Our livelihood is directly tied to our employment.

How We Got Here

The United States built much of its social safety net through the employment relationship rather than outside of it. Unlike many peer nations where healthcare, paid leave, and retirement support are universal rights, in the U.S. they are largely employment perks, benefits you earn by having and keeping a job, or that your employer chooses to provide.

That is a precarious design. And it’s becoming more so.

A few things worth noting about this picture. Nearly every program in the second column is means-tested, meaning you must prove low income to qualify, and several now carry work requirements of their own. SNAP limits benefits for able-bodied adults without dependents who aren’t working. Legislation passed in 2025 expanded those requirements and added work requirements for many Medicaid recipients. The programs designed to catch people outside of employment are themselves increasingly tied back to employment.

And the programs in the first column? They’ve been eroding too. Contract work is replacing full-time employment, taking benefits with it. Wages have stagnated while costs have risen. A college degree no longer delivers the economic certainty it once promised. The safety net that was always thin is becoming thinner.

There is also a moral dimension worth naming. In American culture, needing help has long carried a stigma. The programs in the second column (the ones available regardless of employment) carry the weight of that shame in ways the first column does not. We have built an economy that treats employment as the measure of a person’s contribution and worth. Which means that when the employment relationship breaks down, people don’t just lose income, they lose social standing and identity.

What This Means for Employers

The result of all of this is that people come to work carrying the weight of knowing that their healthcare, their retirement, their ability to weather an unexpected crisis, is tied to this job, this employer, these decisions made by people with power over their situation.

That is a significant thing to carry into a working relationship. And it places a significant responsibility on the employer.

Many employers feel that weight, even if they haven’t named it. The legal responsibilities of employment create a real burden. Providing benefits, navigating leave laws, managing the consequences of termination: these are not small asks, and some employers are neither equipped nor willing to carry them beyond the bare minimum the law requires.

But here’s what’s also true: employees’ need for stability, and for feeling that someone in power is looking out for them don’t disappear because an employer finds them cumbersome. They just go unmet. And unmet expectations, operating silently underneath the employment relationship, are where the social contract creates real challenges.

At Leverage to Lead, we’ve lived this from the inside. A few years ago, we made the decision to transition from a health reimbursement arrangement — where employees were reimbursed for individual healthcare costs — to employer-sponsored benefits. It was a significant operational shift, and our CHRIO Kim gave the team six months of runway to prepare.

Six months should have been enough. For some of us, it wasn’t.

What we noticed, watching ourselves and each other move through it, was how quickly the change activated these unspoken expectations and assumptions about the motive. All one team member could see was that a benefit was being taken away. The story became loud and, to her, very certain: this was unfair, incomprehensible, something being done to them. The six months of runway didn’t matter to the part of the brain that had registered threat.

What eventually helped was being heard. Leadership set up a meeting to share the context, explain the purpose of the change, and make space for every question and concern. Full commitment still took time. But feeling genuinely seen and understood became the path through.

That’s the consequences of the social contract in action. When those expectations are invisible, even well-intentioned decisions can land as betrayal. When they’re named and tended, even hard changes can be navigated together.

Making the Invisible Visible as a Practice

This is the tension at the heart of the employer-employee relationship right now. Employees need more from work than work was designed to give. Employers are absorbing expectations that can feel far beyond their role or capacity. And both sides are operating from assumptions they’ve never said out loud.

What organizations can reasonably expect from their employees, and what employees can reasonably expect from their organizations, are questions worth asking explicitly, as an ongoing practice of clarity and care. Ultimately, this is the willingness to ask what we owe each other, and to answer honestly.

In the next post in this series, we’ll look at how that contract lives inside your organization through the assumptions people carry, the stories they tell when change disrupts the expected order, and what it takes to make the unspoken legible.