An open letter to Expeditors International – when promises become punchlines

To Expeditors International of Washington, Inc’s Attorneys:

My father, who worked in construction, also spent a good part of his career creating technical illustrations for defense contracts at General Electric, translating complex engineering concepts into visual blueprints that helped build America’s military capabilities during the Cold War. My mother’s fingers bore the permanent indentations of textile work until trade liberalization sent those jobs overseas. They raised me to believe that an honest day’s work deserved honest treatment in return, that companies had obligations beyond their balance sheets.

As an attorney who now represents blue-collar workers across the world, I’ve watched that fundamental bargain crumble, one broken promise at a time.

Your company once stood apart. For over two decades, Expeditors built its reputation on a simple but profound commitment: you didn’t lay off employees. Period. This wasn’t just corporate policy; it was your identity, your brand, the foundation of trust between management and the workers who moved your freight, managed your warehouses, and built your success. That promise meant something to the dock worker in Seattle planning his daughter’s college fund, to the freight coordinator in Chicago buying her first home, to families across the country who believed they’d found that increasingly rare thing in American business: genuine job security.

But promises, as working families have learned the hard way over the past four decades, are only as strong as the people making them. Since the 1980s, we’ve witnessed the systematic dismantling of worker protections that once made the American Dream accessible to people without college degrees. Union membership plummeted from 35% to barely 10%. Pensions have given way to 401(k)s that evaporate in market downturns. “Right-to-work” laws have gutted collective bargaining power. And increasingly, companies have discovered they can exploit workers’ most basic fears, losing their jobs, missing mortgage payments, choosing between healthcare and groceries, to extract ever-greater productivity for ever-smaller compensation.

The leadership decisions that drove this transformation didn’t happen in isolation. They were made by specific individuals, in specific boardrooms, with specific consequences for real families. At Expeditors, those decisions flowed from the executive suite where CEO Jeffrey Musser and his leadership team weighed competing priorities. The question isn’t whether business pressures existed, they always do. The question is how leaders chose to respond when their stated values collided with financial convenience.

This exploitation operates on a cruel psychological level.

Companies like yours understand that workers crave stability above almost everything else. Your leadership team built entire recruitment strategies around this need, marketing your “people-driven” culture and no-layoff legacy to attract talent who might earn more elsewhere but prioritized security over salary. You created, a “legitimate expectation” of continued employment, a reasonable belief based on decades of consistent behavior and explicit policy statements.

Yet when economic pressures mounted, when shareholders demanded higher returns, when the going got tough, your executive leadership discovered what so many American corporate leaders have learned: worker loyalty is a one-way street. The same fears you once soothed – job loss, financial instability, family insecurity – became weapons in your arsenal, in my view. Workers who had given you their best years, who had turned down other opportunities based on your promises, suddenly found themselves disposable, as I found out.

The hypocrisy is breathtaking, and it flows directly from leadership choices. For decades, your executives celebrated the no-layoff policy as proof of superior corporate character. They contrasted Expeditors with competitors who treated workers as expendable variables in quarterly profit equations. They created a culture where employees invested deeply in your success because leadership convinced them you were invested in theirs.

But when the test came, when living up to your values required sacrifice from shareholders rather than workers, your leadership team revealed that the “people-driven” philosophy was just another marketing slogan. The employees who had built your company, who had foregone higher-paying opportunities elsewhere based on leadership’s promises of security, discovered they had been played for fools.

A new management team now leading the company can change that.

Because this isn’t just about broken promises; it’s about the systematic betrayal of working people by the very leaders they trusted most. The courts, despite their noble intentions, cannot protect workers from this kind of corporate duplicity. Employment-at-will doctrine gives company leadership broad latitude to terminate workers regardless of prior promises or legitimate expectations. Even when executives create reasonable expectations of job security through decades of consistent behavior, legal remedies remain limited and uncertain.

The deck is stacked against workers in ways that would have shocked previous generations. Corporate leaders can promise anything during good times, knowing they can abandon those promises when convenient. They can exploit workers’ most basic needs, security, stability, the ability to plan for their families’ futures, while maintaining legal impunity for their betrayals. The very fears they once promised to alleviate become tools of exploitation in the hands of executives who prioritize profits over people.

But there’s something else happening here, something your corporate strategists might not have anticipated. When companies build their entire identity around worker-friendly policies and then abandon them spectacularly, they don’t just break individual contracts, they become symbols. They become cautionary tales. They become, in the language of internet culture, memes, some of which will become classics and viewed for years to come.

The story of leadership that spent decades promising “no layoffs” only to engineer what I believe was a covert reduction program is precisely the kind of corporate hypocrisy that resonates in our digital age. It has all the elements of a viral narrative: the sympathetic workers, the executive villains, the broken promises, the David-versus-Goliath dynamic. In an era where social media can amplify worker grievances beyond anything traditional media could achieve, companies whose leaders betray their stated values often find themselves immortalized in ways they never intended.

Your workers deserved better leadership. They deserved honesty about your intentions instead of false promises about job security. They deserved transparency about business challenges instead of covert programs designed to circumvent your stated policies. Ultimately, they deserved executives who treated them as human beings whose livelihoods matter, not just as costs to be minimized when convenient.

Over the coming weeks, I will be publishing a detailed examination of Expeditors’ transformation from a “no-layoff” company to a firm that allegedly engineered systematic workforce reductions while maintaining the pretense of its founding values. This series will shine a light on specific leadership decisions, document the human cost of broken promises, and allow readers to judge for themselves whether your executives lived up to the standards they publicly embraced.

I invite your leadership team to respond. Explain your decision-making process. Justify the abandonment of decades-old policies. Tell us why workers who believed in your promises deserved what they got. The Loadstar platform, as agreed with the editorial team, is yours – use it to defend or just explain your actions, clarify your positions, or acknowledge your failures. The public deserves to hear your side of the story.

The business community is watching. Workers across the logistics industry are taking notes. The next generation of employees will remember which company leaders honored their commitments when times got tough and which abandoned their values for short-term profit. In an era where corporate reputation can be built or destroyed with viral speed, the cost of broken promises extends far beyond immediate financial calculations, short-term returns for shareholders.

Your leadership still has an opportunity to demonstrate that corporate values can mean something, that worker welfare can matter more than quarterly earnings reports, that the people who built your success deserve more than executive betrayal disguised as business necessity. The question is whether your leaders now have the courage to put people before profits when it actually costs something to do so.

History will judge how your executives answer that question. So will the internet. And soon, so will The Loadstar‘s readers.

(Next: “The Expeditors Files” – How a “no-layoff” company’s leadership and Covid-19 set the stage for the perfect betrayal; a seasoned US attorney with over 25 years in litigation, Adam Clermont is now based in Hong Kong, specialising in cross-border disputes, logistics-related legal challenges, and human rights advocacy. Adam can be contacted on LinkedIn here or via email at [email protected])