MIT professor Paul Osterman spent years researching a phenomenon most professionals feel but rarely see named directly. His conclusion, published this week in a new book covered by Fortune, puts a number on it. 35% of the American workforce, more than 55 million people now falls into what Osterman classifies as “disposable” work. Not just gig workers or freelancers, W-2 employees, and people with job titles, benefits, and a desk inside an organization that hired them with an implicit understanding that they won’t advance and won’t stay long.
“No one has job security anymore,” Osterman told Fortune, “but these folks are hired with that expectation and are not going to be around for long.” Glassdoor’s chief economist added a data point that underscores how this is playing out in real time: mentions of burnout in Glassdoor reviews are up 43% compared to a year ago, not because people are working harder, but because they’re working inside environments that stopped investing in them. And they feel it every single day.
The book is titled Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment. I want to tell you what I’ve watched happen inside the organizations where those workers ended up, and what the professionals who rose despite that environment consistently did differently.
What Disposable Actually Means From The Inside
Most coverage of Osterman’s research focuses on the structural diagnosis, the economic forces, the corporate decisions, the policy failures that produced 55 million workers in this category. That diagnosis is accurate and important, but it doesn’t answer the question most professionals are actually sitting with when they read it. If I’m inside one of these organizations, and statistically, there’s a one-in-three chance that I am — what do I do about it?
I spent more than twenty years inside global organizations in People and Talent, sitting in the calibration rooms, the succession planning conversations, and the leadership decisions where the informal verdicts about who advances and who doesn’t actually get made. And the pattern I watched play out across every kind of organization, in every kind of economic environment, is more specific than most people realize. The disposable-worker dynamic isn’t experienced equally across an organization.
Inside the same company sometimes inside the same department, some professionals are treated as investments and others are treated as costs. The organizational structure is the same, the compensation is often similar, and the job descriptions overlap. What’s different is something that almost never appears in any official document or policy. The informal trust the organization has placed in certain people and withheld from others.
What The Research Is Actually Measuring
Osterman’s category of “marginal workers”, W-2 employees treated as disposable is characterized by one specific and telling feature: the organization made no real commitment to their development from the start. No investment in their learning curve, no intention of building a relationship with them that extends beyond their immediate utility, and no informal advocacy from a senior leader who decided this person was worth watching. That absence is not random.
It is almost always the result of the organization making a rapid, informal assessment of a new professional in their first weeks and concluding, before any formal evaluation has begun, that this person is not someone to invest in. That assessment happens in the same rooms I sat in for twenty years. And it is almost never based on the professional’s credentials, their formal performance, or their potential.
It is based on the specific, informal signals they send in the early days of their organizational experience, how trust forms between them and the people around them, how credibility develops with the colleagues who hold influence, and how the organization comes to understand what they are actually capable of.
The professionals who get classified as disposable, not formally, not in any HR system, but in the informal verdict that shapes how they’re treated, almost always share a specific characteristic. They waited for the organization to notice them before they started building the relationships that make them noticeable.
The Specific Pattern Of The Professionals Who Rise
Across two decades of watching who advances inside organizations, including the ones that treated most of their workforce as expendable, I observed a consistent pattern among the professionals who rose despite that environment. They understood something most of their colleagues didn’t.
The organization’s default posture toward any new professional is not investment. It is assessment. And the window during which that assessment is most actively happening, the first 30, 60, and 90 days of any new role, transition, or promotion, is the most important professional window most people never deliberately prepare for.
The professionals who escaped the disposable category inside organizations that produced it weren’t always the most credentialed or the most experienced. They were the ones who built organizational trust so specifically and so consistently in that early window that the informal verdict written about them was different from the one written about their peers.
They made their contribution legible, not through self-promotion, but through the specific, visible, consistent quality of how they showed up in rooms where it mattered. They made their value clear before anyone had to ask. They communicated in the moments that mattered rather than on a schedule. They treated the priorities of the people above them as genuinely important, not as a political strategy, but as a professional orientation.
And perhaps most consequentially they built the internal relationships that produced advocates. Not a network in the conventional sense. The specific, close professional relationships with the people who would speak their name in rooms they weren’t in. Who would say, from direct personal experience, that this person was worth investing in.
That advocacy is what separates the professionals who get developed from the ones who get managed out. And it is built, or not built, almost entirely in the informal dynamics of the first 90 days.
Why This Matters More Right Now Than At Any Point In Recent Memory
Osterman’s research captures a structural shift that has been building for decades but has accelerated sharply in the last several years. The implicit social contract between organizations and employees, the expectation of mutual investment, development, and loyalty has eroded significantly across a wide swath of the economy.
The Glassdoor burnout data confirms what the employment structure predicts: when organizations stop investing in people, people stop recovering from the work. The 43% increase in burnout mentions isn’t a wellness crisis. It’s a trust crisis. And trust crises inside organizations almost always produce two categories of professional response.
The first, and by far the more common is to withdraw the investment of discretionary effort in proportion to the organization’s withdrawal of investment in you. To do the job adequately, to stop going beyond what’s required, and to wait for the organization to change before you change how you show up.
The second is rarer and more consequential. It is to understand that in an environment where the organization has stopped distinguishing between its people, the professional who builds trust, credibility, and internal advocacy deliberately becomes extraordinary, not despite the environment, but precisely because of it.
When most people are quietly withdrawing, the professional who shows up fully becomes impossible to overlook. When most people are waiting to be invested in, the professional who builds relationships proactively becomes the one the organization discovers it cannot afford to lose. The research named the structural problem, but the response to it is not structural, it’s personal.
The One Thing Worth Doing Differently In The Week Ahead
Osterman’s book does not offer an easy solution to the disposable-worker economy. There isn’t one, the structural forces he describes are real and significant and not solvable by individual behavior alone. But the professionals I watched rise inside those environments, and there were many, even in the most organizationally indifferent contexts — did something specific and consistent that is worth naming directly.
They treated the quality of their professional presence as the one variable entirely within their control. Not their compensation, not their title, and not the investment the organization chose to make or withhold. The quality of their contribution, the consistency of their character, and the relationships they built, deliberately, generously, and with a long enough time horizon that the organization’s short-term transactional posture couldn’t erode them.
In the research terms Osterman uses, they refused to be disposable, not by demanding the organization treat them differently, but by making themselves genuinely impossible to treat that way. That’s not a small thing.
In an economy where 55 million workers are classified as expendable, becoming the professional that an organization discovers it cannot afford to lose is one of the most consequential career investments anyone can make. The research named the problem, but you get to decide whether you’re defined by it.
About Isaac Adesugba
Isaac is a Southern California-based Global People & Talent Management Executive, author of The Ultimate Impression (available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese on Amazon), and corporate readiness speaker. He works with professionals, universities, and organizations on the trust and credibility disciplines that determine career trajectory before any formal evaluation process begins.
First 90 Coach, his free AI coaching tool built on these frameworks, is now rebranding to The Impression Advantage Coach — available on the OpenAI GPT Store.
The Impression Advantage Workshop — a half or full-day engagement for new hire cohorts, newly promoted managers, and organizations navigating transition is also available. Request a proposal at careeradvicebyisaac.com.
