Companies Continue to Cut Employee Benefits for the Worst Reasons

Employee benefits are looking at this week, and it’s because of three recent stories of US companies cutting wages without paying workers.

A Texas technology company with a forgotten name—TTEC—suddenly became unremembered when it suspended its 401(k) match program for 16,000 employees at the end of 2026. According to Business Insiderwhich saw an internal TTEC memo, the company plans to invest in AI certification, AI tools and training, and automation, among others.

Accounting and consulting giant Deloitte is also there they say they are reducing profits for other workers from next year. These include reducing PTO, cutting parental leave in half, and eliminating $50,000 in benefits for family planning services such as adoption, surrogacy, and IVF. San Francisco-based Zoom, meanwhile, has made some changes and reduced its parental leave for employees from 22 weeks to 18 weeks for biological parents.

So what is causing this? And are there more cuts to come? The latter is impossible to answer, and the former is much more difficult than “corporate groups go to AI.”

First, “what Deloitte did is unacceptable,” says Joan C. Williams, a professor at UC Law San Francisco, author of several books on work culture and corporate governance, and a widely cited expert on these topics. The company is reducing the benefits of a certain group of internal employees – in admin, IT support, and finance – and leaving benefits for people who face the customer. The affected employee will see their parental leave cut from 16 weeks to just eight weeks.

“It treats people differently based on the type of work they do, and limiting every woman to eight weeks of paid leave is unusual,” Williams said. But when the power changes, the profit decreases.

AI is the easiest excuse these days for everyone corporate decision that it harms workers. But the motivation here is the cost of benefits alone. Earlier this year subsidies from the Affordable Care Act ended, and people began to give up on everything. Insurers have said this One reason is that they have raised the premium.

Sarahjane Sacchetti, former chief executive of benefits management companies Cleo and Collective Health, which is working on a new health care initiative, told me that costs for employer-sponsored health plans have grown dramatically over the past five years. A survey last year of 1,700 US employers by healthcare group Mercer found that the cost of health care per employee is expected to rise by about 6.5 percent in 2026, the highest since 2010. And that was after efforts to cut costs; Otherwise, the cost of the policy may increase by about 9 percent.

“That just starts to eat into how you think about compensation as an employer,” says Sacchetti. That doesn’t mean the company is a ‘good guy,’ he says, but the instability of American health care policies and the lack of safety nets are the main causes of stress that lead to workers being underpaid or fired.

Williams points out that the US is one of the few countries that does not offer paid maternity leave—putting together Papua New Guinea and Suriname. “This just goes to show how crazy it is to provide basic benefits to workers like pensions and paid parental leave through employers instead of doing it the way developed countries do,” says Williams. His desired answer? “The US should join the rest of the world.”

The irony is that the United States government says it favors women to have more children. If women in the US are – as the famous doctor Mehmet Oz said this week in the Oval Office -“infertile” (Oz also said that “making babies” is “a very interesting thing.” the most creative thing the universe knows.” (Don’t tell the AI ​​CEOs.)