The book
Trust Fall
Americans have stopped trusting nearly everyone: the government, media, even neighbors. Yet ask people about their managers and coworkers, and most say they trust them. That contrast is the puzzle behind Trust Fall. I went inside four work settings — a restaurant, a marketing agency, a tech start-up, and New York City’s Uber and Lyft circuit — and spent more than 1,200 hours watching how trust actually gets made, used, and spent at work.
I expected to find that workplace trust was largely a corporate fiction. Instead, I found real care and connection. People rely on one another to do their jobs, find opportunities, and navigate an insecure labor market. Those relationships matter deeply. They also carry three costs that management’s celebration of trust often overlooks.
Personal relationships are taking on responsibilities that employers and public institutions have left unmet. Workers stitch together solutions that keep work moving and hold teams together, asking more of their relationships than those ties can reliably bear and wearing themselves out in the process.
Trust can become a tool of labor discipline. Workers face pressure to prove themselves trustworthy to stay employed and employable, even when that means accepting unreasonable demands or keeping grievances to themselves. They also depend on trusted colleagues and managers for everyday support and future opportunities, making it harder to push back, ask for more, or leave without jeopardizing relationships they need.
As work consumes more of our time and emotional energy, it can crowd out the personal and civic relationships we also need, potentially deepening loneliness and fraying the fabric of our shared public life.
Trust Fall follows people navigating these contradictions: finding care in relationships that can also deepen their vulnerability. It offers language for experiences readers may recognize but struggle to name and connects those experiences to the larger conditions shaping our working lives.
“A remarkable achievement, and unlike any other workplace book I’ve encountered… A decoder ring of a book.”
— Anne Helen Petersen, Culture Study
“A revelatory guide — sometimes humorous, always trenchant — to the subtle, contradictory, and potent force that is trust in the workplace.”
— Allison Pugh, Professor of Sociology, Johns Hopkins
“Ranks among the best ethnographic accounts of how employers of all kinds manipulate intimacy on the job.”
— Melissa Gregg, author of Counterproductive
“Brilliant new language to name the harms wrought by our unequal system of work. For a renewed labor movement, Trust Fall stands tall.”
— Caitlyn Collins, author of Making Motherhood Work
“A timely must-read on trust in the modern workplace… important insights on what is at stake—and for whom—when workplaces are insecure and trust becomes paramount.”
— Megan Tobias Neely, author of Hedged Out
“Mosseri’s immersion in four American workplaces… gives us a powerful vocabulary for critiquing inequality in modern workplaces.”
— Jaclyn S. Wong, author of Equal Partners?
“After a few years in a workplace that absolutely weaponized trust disguised as ‘care,’ it landed very differently as I read it. Your book has helped me make sense of, heal from, and move forward.”
— Jonathan, reader
“An intelligent, insightful, well-researched and well-written book. Your work has given me more articulate explanations for some of the ‘yuckiness’ I have felt and experienced in jobs.”
— Jennifer W., reader
Read it for yourself.
Watch & listen
In conversation
Hear me in conversation — interviews and talks on trust, burnout, and what really holds a team together.
