All of this raises a harder question. If careers-page language is mostly a reflection of the labor market, what does it say about worker power?
To find out, I overlaid three language trajectories — idealism, DEI, and performance — against the JOLTS quit rate from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, a rough proxy for when workers had the leverage to walk. It’s not an exact science, but the patterns are there.
The clearest signal is DEI. Worker-oriented language climbed through the late 2010s and crested in 2021, right on the 2021–22 generational peak in the quits rate, when workers had the most leverage to walk. It stayed elevated for three more years. Then, in 2025–26, after that leverage had drained back below pre-pandemic levels and the 2024 election turned the political winds, it was pulled back hard: Meta’s DEI-register share went from saturated to zero, Amazon’s halved. The language companies adopted when workers had power was unwound once they didn’t.
That retreat is the heart of it. The concessions weren’t immediate — DEI stayed high for years after the quits rate began falling — but they were sticky, not permanent, and the moment leverage was gone and the politics gave cover, they snapped back. Idealism rode the same cycle with a smaller swing; its crest also lands on the 2021–22 worker-power peak, for all that workers were always a little cynical about billionaires promising to change the world. Performance, which serves whoever can hire and fire, stays flat near the top no matter what.
In 2026 you can’t trust what a company says about itself. But you can trust the pattern of when it stops saying it: the worker-serving language is the part that gets cut when leverage is gone. Cultural signaling doesn’t give workers power — it reflects the power they already have.
How this was measured
Each line is an industry mean over the same thirteen companies (2013–2026), every one scored on all three axes — no per-metric subsetting. The quits rate is economy-wide, a proxy for tech bargaining power; read this as co-movement, not causation.
Both counterforces track the quits rate strongly in raw terms (idealism r ≈ +0.74, DEI r ≈ +0.71), and both keep some of that under first-differencing, which strips out shared trend (idealism r ≈ +0.41, DEI r ≈ +0.27) — suggestive, not decisive, on thirteen year-pairs. Which of the two tracks the cycle more closely is not a stable result: in an eleven-company draft DEI led, and adding two companies flipped the ordering — so I won’t hang anything on it. What the differencing understates for DEI is the lag: it peaked with worker power in 2021 but didn’t retreat until 2025–26, so the year-over-year ticks miss how well the overall shape — surge at the peak, collapse once leverage is gone — follows the cycle. (An earlier draft reported a much starker DEI number that turned out to be an artifact of incomplete data — one company’s mid-decade DEI language was unclassified and counted as zero — which is part of why I treat these correlations as supporting texture, not the finding.)
Performance’s raw correlation (r ≈ +0.45) disappears entirely under differencing (r ≈ +0.05): all shared trend, no year-over-year co-movement — the substrate that needs no leverage. And one honest confound runs through all of it: the 2025–26 DEI retreat coincides with both fading worker leverage and a political backlash, and this data can’t separate the two. What it can show is that the worker-serving language is the part that got cut.
One axis is missing on purpose. Wellbeing — the balance-and-rest framing that’s the clearest worker concession — lives in benefits copy, not mission statements, so this careers corpus under-measures it badly. It belongs with the benefits data, where I’ll come back to it.