Employee benefits are in the spotlight this week, and that’s because of three recent stories about American companies cutting back on non-wage compensation for workers.
A Texas technology consulting firm with a forgettable name—TTEC—suddenly became more memorable when it suspended its voluntary 401(k) match plan for 16,000 employees until at least the end of 2026. According to Business Insidewhich viewed an internal TTEC memo, the company plans to invest in AI validation, AI tools and training, and automation, among other things.
The major auditing and consulting firm Deloitte is also there is reported to reduce profits for some employees from next year. This includes reducing PTO, cutting parental leave in half, and eliminating the $50,000 payment for family planning services such as adoption, surrogacy, and IVF. San Francisco-based Zoom, meanwhile, has made minor changes and reduced its parental leave for employees from 22 weeks to 18 weeks for birth parents.
So what is the driving force behind this? And are there more cuts to come? The latter is impossible to answer, and the former is unfortunately more difficult than “corporate ghouls to AI.”
First of all, “what Deloitte did is completely unacceptable,” says Joan C. Williams, a professor at UC Law San Francisco, author of several books on work culture and class dynamics, and a frequently cited scholar on these topics. A consulting firm minimizes the benefits of a specific group of internal employees—in management, IT support, and finance—while leaving strong benefits for people in client-facing roles. The affected employee will see their maternity leave cut from 16 weeks to just eight weeks.
“It treats people differently based on the type of work they do, and reducing any mother to eight weeks of paid leave is incredible,” Williams says. “When the work is hard, the employers are more generous. But as soon as the power changes, the benefits decrease.”
AI is certainly a convenient excuse these days for any organizational decision that harms workers. But the motivation here is also the cost of the benefits themselves. Earlier this year subsidies from the Affordable Care Act ended, and people started dropping out of health care plans altogether. Insurance have mentioned this as one reason they have increased the payment.
Sarahjane Sacchetti, a former executive at benefits management firms Cleo and Collective Health, who is working on a new health care plan, told me that the costs of employer-sponsored health plans have increased significantly over the past five years. A survey last year of more than 1,700 US employers by the health care consulting group Mercer found that health care costs per employee were expected to rise by an average of 6.5 percent in 2026, the highest since 2010. And this was after taking into account cost-cutting measures; otherwise, the cost of the plan would rise by nearly 9 percent.
“This just starts with understanding how you think about total compensation as an employer,” Sacchetti says. That doesn’t mean the organization is a ‘good guy,’ he says, but the poor state of American health care policy and the lack of a safety net are responsible for many of the problems that befall laid-off or laid-off workers.
Williams says that the United States is one of the few countries that does not offer federally paid maternity leave—putting it in league with Papua New Guinea and Suriname. “This just goes to show how crazy it is to provide basic workers like pensions and paid parental leave through private employers instead of the way other industrialized countries do,” Williams says. His proposed solution? “America needs to join the rest of the world.”
The irony, of course, is that the US government claims to be concerned about women having more children. If women in America are—as the famous doctor Mehmet Oz put it this week in the Oval Office—”a young child,” the general federal paid leave policy would be an obvious place to start. the most creative thing the world knows.” Don’t tell AI CEOs.)
