Hey, it's Mark and welcome back to the next edition of the Employee Survival Guide, where I tell you, as always, what your employer does not want you to know about and a lot more. Today we're talking about employonomics, the thing that employers do to employees every day. Employnomics is a term covering literally every aspect of working and the dysfunctional relationship between corporate management and all employees. The term is synonymous with corporate power and money to the immediate disadvantage of employees. Employnomics is the intention and often willful behavioral force, the imbalance of power or leverage, and the dehumanization of employees, all with a singular goal of making money for employers at any cost. Discrimination pays in the system of employnomics, whether at the individual manager or coworker level, discrimination can be used to increase the economic, political clout of each offender. At the systemic level, the organization benefits financially. Our anti-discrimination laws are designed to deter economic gains resulting from overt and subversive discriminatory employment practices, yet the system is imperfect. The term employment helps explain why employees never get a benefit from entering into a non competition agreement. Employees never ask for the agreement, and they cannot negotiate the terms of the one-sided adhesion contract. Employers use noncompete agreements as corporate chess pieces to fend off competition, stifle third party development, and ruin careers in the process. The term employonomics explains why employers push employees into forced arbitration agreements to hide their discriminatory and previously distorted sexual harassment cases, which is now illegal. It is the greatest corporate damage control instrument ever created to benefit employer reputations, especially in the era in the internet age. Arbitration saves money for employers who will have to pay for discrimination and corporate abuse of whistleblowers. Arbitrators are known to split the baby regarding judgments, some for employees, and here's some for employers. Employees never agreed to or could negotiate these one-sided agreements. Courts and Congress have all but eternally sanctioned arbitration under the Federal Arbitration Act. Arbitration pays and benefits only employers. The term Employmics also explains how employers deliberately engage in wage theft under state and federal law. Billions of dollars are saved each year through the trickery of 1099 employment in full view of regulators with a lack of resources to combat them all. The term Employnomics helps explain why Amazon factory workers cannot take a urination break on the floor. Employnomics also includes the pervasive performance improvement plans used to build defense cases, not better employee performance. The term employnomics is also synonymous with current management efforts to force productive remote workers back to the office because the employers need to utilize office rents. The term employment can also help explain why employers are shifting away from providing performance reviews and feedback to something even more vague and confusing, HR language, to make employees feel less anxious about getting performance feedback from their managers. And here's my favorite employment's concept of all time, the at-will rule, a legal term to conceal a vast majority of discriminatory and regulatory behavioral without legal consequence. Billions are saved each year under the guise of the at-will termination. As courts routinely uphold this prerogative of employers, employees face an enormous financial and emotional burden to demonstrate such terminations were illegal, which is exponentially more complicated when the termination is labeled as a reduction in force, mass layoff, and headcount reduction. Yet employers still cannot understand why employees just don't trust their employers, and corporate culture is always nonexistent. Employee engagement is at an all-time low in 2025. Employers would financially benefit from hiring employees with four-cause termination basis, which promotes a foundational trust between employees and private government they work for. Montana is the only state in the country that has successfully legalized forecast terminations and done away with the outwill employment rule. The list of situations covered by the term employment is endless. Now we have a term or word of art to describe how employers adversely benefit from the imbalance of power over employees.