Stop with corporate slop

“I’m thrilled to be joining [insert company] … [insert AI slop].” 

“I’m so excited to have worked with [insert company] … [insert AI slop].”

I’ve had enough. 

The value of networking and professionally branding yourself has been drilled into the heads of students trying to land a job or internship.

“I think (LinkedIn) just encourages students to develop their networking skills early on,” said Jasmine Wu, an assistant professor of organizational communication and technology. “Social skills, networking skills and communication presentation skills are as important as hard skills or technical skills, especially when you’re further down into your career.”

Networking and developing soft skills aren’t inherently bad, but using language typically reserved for a love proclamation to describe working at a defense contractor masks the struggles individual workers face. The pressure for individuals to praise and publicly support their company on LinkedIn, according to Wu, comes from management, professional norms and a fear of damaging their careers.

“When people post on LinkedIn or other sources of professional social media platforms, they definitely have this normative control from both the company itself and the norm of the platform,” Wu said.

The percentage of revenue going to American workers in early 2026 was 54.1%, the lowest level since they began tracking during World War II. At the same time, there’s been a rise in contracting, along with the use of non-traditional work, where benefits like health insurance, paid time off, retirement and the right to organize are lacking. 

“I think from (an) individual perspective, it’s very hard if there’s no nationwide labor law or policy to protect employees,” said Helen Chen, a second-year PhD student studying economic sociology. “(It’s) especially (hard for) the vulnerable people (in) the lower, younger entry level.” 

A 2022 Pew Research Center poll found that U.S. adults believe 71% of large corporations and 56% of banks and other financial institutions have a negative effect on the country. Why do we have a job market where 21% of employees feel pressured to compromise their ethical standards, and why do one-third of employees who have witnessed unethical or illegal conduct say that a fear of negative consequences would stop them from reporting it? Without collective bargaining power, bootlicking corporate executives becomes a means of surviving the broken job market, despite widespread negative sentiment towards corporate ethics.

The problems workers experience collectively are being portrayed as a problem for an individual to solve. In 2018, 3,100 Google employees petitioned against Project Maven, an AI military surveillance project, resulting in Google not renewing its contract with the Pentagon. Kickstarter formed one of the first company-wide unions in 2020 and successfully negotiated a contract in 2025 protecting full-time workers’ positions from being outsourced by contractors or AI, and implementing a four-day workweek and minimum salary. These two examples of workers overcoming a professional landscape acting against employees’ interests highlight the efficacy of collective action.

Maybe you’re actually thrilled to have a job, but maybe you’re just doing it for a check. Either way, worshipping work as a means to bolster job security is an individual solution to a collective problem. By leveraging our outrage in the system and choosing solidarity over celebrating survival in a flawed system, we can collectively reject the conditions being forced on us.

Chatterjee is a government junior from Allen, Texas.

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