In late 2025 and in the first months of 2026, a wave of layoffs have thrown tens of thousands out of work.
Amazon recently announced plans to lay off 16,000 workers, on top of 14,000 they laid off last October. Oracle is also preparing to lay off 30,000 workers. Meta recently laid of 1,500 workers. Even smaller companies are slashing their workforces, with the small tech company Block recently laying off 4,000 workers, a number equal to 40% of its workforce! Although tech is leading the way, corporations outside the tech world are also cutting workers loose. UPS, for example, is laying off 30,000, while banks like Citigroup and Morgan Stanley are laying off 1,000 and 2,500 respectively. The most recent Labor Department report found that 92,000 workers lost their jobs in February alone. And none of this even takes into account the job cuts that will come along with big mergers, like the one just announced between Paramount-Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery.
These cuts are likely to continue and perhaps even get worse as companies invest more in AI and as it gets better at doing work currently done by humans.
AI is already being cited by many of these companies as the reason for the layoffs. Much like with any new technologies, capitalists use those technologies to increase their efficiency and allow them to produce their commodities more cheaply. This often means laying off workers.
Another reason cited is that many companies hired rapidly during and immediately after the pandemic, and for the past year or two have been going through a “correction,” in which they correct course from their massive hiring spree.
Although both of these reasons are obviously true, it is also true that to some extent these layoffs are just capitalism doing what it does. Corporate CEOs and owners always hire and produce as fast as they can when they see the opportunity for growth and profit. When demand is high, companies produce as much as they can to capture as much market share as they can, leading to overproduction. This means that they also “over-hire” workers. Eventually they recognize a year or two later that they produced too much or hired too many workers. Or, that a new technology has come along that allows them to produce the same commodities, but now with less workers or in shorter amounts of time. And then they make cuts.
But no matter which is the primary culprit, the effects of these cuts are the same. Workers lose jobs, savings disappear, families struggle, and those lucky enough to find new work rarely make as much as they did before. Real people suffer.
But none of that matters to the capitalists who run the show. Their goal is profit, and they couldn’t care less about how that affects us. It’s all part of the system.
It’s exactly why this system needs to go.
