The Great Workplace Trust Fallacy

American workers have become experts at covering for each other when labor systems fail them, but this interpersonal trust is functioning as an unpaid safety net that's bound to collapse.

Jake finally used up his last favor. Another morning, another delayed train crawling out of Coney Island toward Midtown. On a good day, he could make the trip to work in just over an hour. But this was the New York City subway: signal failures, rerouted trains, and phantom arrivals could easily add thirty minutes or more. Usually, Jake would text his restaurant coworkers who lived closer, and someone would step in to cover, often even on short notice. He’d certainly done the same for them. But not today. That left his fate in his manager Paul’s hands. Paul liked Jake – he was always the first to pitch in, always willing to pick up shifts. But it wasn’t enough to save him. When Jake walked in, Paul just sighed, “You know you can’t work here anymore, man.”

Jake's story illustrates a fundamental problem with American work culture: we are forced to rely on each other to solve problems that institutions and policies should address. On the one hand, our ability to rely on interpersonal trust in the workplace is remarkable, especially given that our trust in other contexts continues to decline. On the other hand, this dynamic places an enormous burden on individual workers to make personal sacrifices and extend goodwill to help one another – when they’re willing to – while letting our existing labor structures off the hook.

In other developed countries, workers have protected time off and just-cause employment protections that could have prevented Jake from being fired for transportation issues beyond his control. They also have predictable scheduling rules that reduce last-minute shift calls – the very pressures that contributed to Jake’s chronic tardiness. But in the U.S., we must rely on relational networks instead of structural safeguards. Personal ties may help us stay afloat once or twice, but as I argue in my forthcoming book Trust Fall: How Workplace Relationships Fail Us, they're no match for the relentless churn of today's economy.

I saw this same dynamic play out with Matilda, who worked 60-hour weeks coordinating promotional events for a global marketing firm. Her job was demanding, but for a while, it felt manageable thanks to Harper, her supervisor who shielded the team from unnecessary demands. “I really trusted Harper,” Matilda told me.

Then Matilda’s team was suddenly reassigned. Her new boss, Jane, had strong ties to the executive team but little awareness of the day-to-day realities of Matilda’s role. “[You] get that feeling that nothing’s ever good enough,” Matilda explained of working with Jane. “When you’re putting long hours in, [you start to wonder] what is?”

Things came to a head when Jane asked for a doctor’s note after Matilda requested a single half-day off. Matilda needed the time for an embryo transfer as part of her ongoing IVF treatment, but she didn’t want to disclose something so personal to a supervisor she didn’t trust. After consulting the internet and finding no legal recourse, Matilda reluctantly handed over the note to HR. A month later she lost her job in a company-wide restructuring.

I saw Matilda in the office kitchen a few days later, still working through the final weeks of the transition. “That’s what kills you,” she said. “Do the sacrifices you make matter?” She looked lost as she grappled with whether she and her partner could continue their fertility journey without her income and health benefits.

Matilda is far from alone. I spent 1,200 hours embedded in her workplace and three others – a busy restaurant, a sun-drenched tech startup, and an airport parking lot with Uber and Lyft drivers – observing and conducting interviews with over a hundred workers and managers.

Time and again, people told me that building trust was essential to their survival in the workplace. They worked long hours, addressed endless crises, and performed favors to secure their reputations with coworkers and managers. Trusted relationships made work more bearable and sometimes even joyful. But in the trust fall of modern work, only those with the most powerful networks were consistently caught. Everyone else kept hitting the floor.

This trust is distinct from old-fashioned job loyalty. Workers see job insecurity as inevitable and expect to be let down by employers. But interpersonal trust allows them to build pockets of hope within an otherwise unreliable system. They've learned to rely on people, not institutions, which is why they frequently job-hop but still go to great lengths not to burn bridges along the way.

Of course, the solution isn’t to strip trust from workplace relationships. That would only make a bad situation worse. We want to trust and be trusted at work. But when trust replaces structural support, it stops being a social good and starts functioning like an unpaid safety net – one that’s threadbare at best. Trust then becomes one more thing workers (especially those with the least status and power) are expected to weave and maintain.

When so much of our emotional energy goes into navigating workplace dynamics and proving our worth to colleagues, we have less bandwidth for the relationships and activities that build strong communities and foster civic engagement. This creates another form of dependency on employers – not just economic reliance, but emotional and social dependence as work comes to dominate our identities and social lives.

This is where public policy must step in. Proposals for better labor protections, stronger union rights, and more robust social infrastructure wouldn’t just protect workers materially – they’d help rebalance where trust operates in our society.

But even beyond policy, we should ask: why does workplace functioning depend so heavily on personal relationships? Why do we accept a system where success hinges less on what you contribute and more on who will vouch for you? Why are workers asked to continually prove their commitment to their teams when the institutions that house those teams show no commitment to them?

Trust at work should be a good thing. But it shouldn't be the only thing. Because when we're forced to rely on it too much, the people holding the safety net end up tumbling on top of one another.