The current employment tensions created by very low company hiring rates and just as few workers voluntarily quitting their jobs offer employers something they haven’t enjoyed since before the pandemic: a high degree of staff stability, and an advantage in negotiating pay and benefits. Yet recent survey data indicates business leaders who overplay their upper hands in a tight labor market risk high, costly rates of disgruntled employees jumping ship once things ease up again.

That warning comes in two different polls of employees and business leaders, both of which clearly reflect the tensions in today’s employment market. On the one hand, a survey by recruitment platform iHire showed worker quit rates declined for the second straight year in 2025. At the same time, nearly 20 percent of employers said they carried out layoffs in 2025, and nearly 55 percent reported having fired or terminated staff.

Work opportunity platform JobHire AI got a similar picture from the 2,000 employees it questioned. The majority of those respondents said they were hanging on to their positions because finding other work would be difficult — if not impossible. Just 23 percent said they were staying put because they liked their work or were happy with their employers. In other words, workers are staying close the nearest hearth knowing just how frigid the outside job market is.

“If 2021 was the Great Resignation and 2022–2023 was the Great Confusion, then 2025–2026 is shaping up to be something new: the Great Hold-On — a workforce clinging to stability not because they have it, but because they’re afraid of losing what little they’ve got,” the JobHire AI survey summary said. “This is not the emotional profile of a confident labor market. This is an economy running cold.”

Those workforce chills were reflected in other worker responses in both polls.

Just under 36 percent of the 1,395 participants in iHire’s survey said they’d quit a job in the past year. That was down from 38.5 percent in 2024, and far lower than the 43.3 percent in 2023.

Meanwhile, large numbers of respondents to JobHire AI pollsters described the 2025 labor market as alternatively “exhausting,” “stagnant,” and “depressing.” Another 79 percent of workers said they were worried about its outlook next year, and 71 percent admitted they thought they may get laid off in 2026.

The current low-hire, low-quit, and minimal job creation rates afford business owners more leverage in negotiating salary, benefits, and workload conditions with people they do recruit — and who know how rare those opportunities are. That will likely make itself more painfully evident if more companies turn to the large-scale layoffs that Amazon, UPS, Target, and Verizon have recently announced.

Even if that doesn’t happen, both surveys made it clear that employees are already aware they’re at a disadvantage in the current labor market, and are playing defense. Around 62 percent of JobHire AI respondents said they were sticking with their positions because the prospects for finding anything else were “horrible,” or they feared they’d become “unemployable in the age of AI.”

“This is the Great Hold-On: workers clinging to roles they’ve mentally checked out of, because they assume the alternative is worse,” the JobHire AI report said. “Economists call this ‘job lock.’ Workers call it ‘survival’… When nearly three in four workers are living with layoff risk, you don’t have a resilient workforce. You have a workforce moving through the economy like it’s a minefield.”

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