AI or Alibi: Judgement Day for Knowledge Workers?

Amazon fired 14,000 people this week.

Not from the warehouse floor. Not from supply chain or logistics. Nah, these were white collar workers, the kind who work out of an office, in functions as disparate as tech, recruiting, product and HR.

And while those layoffs might seem like just another entry in the running list of unfortunate events brought to you by Q4 earnings season, this one hit differently.

Because when Amazon makes a move, the rest of corporate America doesn’t blink.

They reload.

Just like Meta’s Year of Efficiency became open season on white-collar headcount a couple years ago (more on this in a moment), Amazon’s pink slips might be the tipping point for a fresh round of mass terminations. Only this time, the story isn’t just about cost cuts.

It’s about who’s to blame. And apparently, the machines did it.

The ink hadn’t even dried on Amazon’s 14,000 pink slips before the next wave of layoff announcements rolled in like Monday morning Slack messages that start with “hi” when you’re hungover. From tech to telecom, from retail to recruiting, this week has been a bloodbath of corporate downsizing disguised as strategic realignment:

Within hours, UPS announced it saw Amazon and decided to up the ante, announcing the elimination of a whopping 48,000 employees, which included 34,000 jobs in “operational efficiency,” which is sort of ironic, all things considered.

Target, whose market share Amazon has been steadily eroding for decades, announced 1200 corporate roles were being eliminated.

Yesterday, venerable entertainment conglomerate Paramount began its planned RIF of over 1000 employees, with another 1000 expected to be cut in the coming weeks. And let’s not forget edtech giant Chegg, who just announced they were laying off 45% of their current workforce (around 400 jobs) due to “the new realities of AI.”

The messaging? “We’re future-proofing.”

The subtext? “We don’t know what the hell we’re doing, but AI sounds like a good reason.”

Because nothing says leadership quite like blaming artificial intelligence for your inability to plan beyond the next earnings call.

Rise of the Machines: A Sequel No One Wanted.

Let’s start with the obvious. Amazon cutting 14,000 jobs barely scratches the surface of its 1.6 million-strong workforce. At face value, that’s not a labor market disaster. It’s a headcount hiccup. Do the math. If one Amazon-sized layoff doesn’t move the macro needle, what would? Try 20.

That’s roughly 280,000 jobs. Sounds like a lot, until you realize that between Salesforce, Microsoft, Google, Dell, and every Series D startup that blew its runway on kombucha fridges, we’re already halfway there. And every day gets us a little bit closer to Judgement Day.

Hell, in the time it took me to move this from draft to final copy, Meta announced it would be cutting hundreds of roles, as did Starbucks and General Motors. Earnings season is the best, you guys.

Even companies that haven’t laid people off are operating in what economists now call a “Great Freeze”. It’s a fancy way of saying nobody’s hiring, nobody’s firing, and everyone’s terrified of making the first move.

It’s like a corporate game of Jenga. The tower still stands, but nobody wants to be the one to pull the next piece. If hiring stays frozen and layoffs keep mounting, the labor market doesn’t need to collapse. It just needs to stop recovering.

But the size of the layoff isn’t the point. It’s the signal it sends.

When the world’s biggest employer starts “streamlining operations,” it gives cover for every other company with a bloated middle management layer and a Chief Innovation Officer who hasn’t innovated since Web 2.0.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is.

As referenced earlier, Meta kicked off its “Year of Efficiency” with 11,000 layoffs. That one move opened the floodgates. Within months, more than a quarter-million tech workers were out of a job, replaced not by machines but by shareholder appeasement and McKinsey slide decks.

This is how market corrections work. Not with one big bang, but with a slow, contagious unraveling. Think layoffs as viral content. Once they trend, they spread.

Don’t Blame the Bots … Yet

Cue the convenient villain of the decade: AI.

If you read the press releases, investor memos, or breathless LinkedIn posts filled with words like “operational efficiency,” “innovation pipeline,” and “strategic focus,” you’d think ChatGPT walked into HQ with a tactial vest and an AR.

The narrative goes something like this: we’re investing in automation, machine learning, and other vaguely defined AI-powered solutions. As a result, certain roles have become redundant. Translation: you’re out, and the algorithm is in.

But let’s get real. This isn’t about AI replacing humans. It’s about humans avoiding accountability.

Because saying “we overhired during the pandemic and now we’re backpedaling faster than a recruiter who double-booked an interview slot” doesn’t look great on an earnings call.

Blaming AI, on the other hand, sounds visionary. You’re not downsizing. You’re disrupting. You’re not eliminating jobs. You’re reimagining the future of work. Investors eat it up. Analysts nod approvingly. The press runs with it.

It’s the perfect PR trifecta. Except it’s mostly fiction.

Hasta La Vista, Hiring Plans

According to Ernie Tedeschi, a senior fellow at Yale’s Budget Lab and former White House economist, what we’re seeing isn’t AI-fueled destruction. It’s a hangover from pandemic-era hiring benders.

“I see this as mainly a correction to pandemic-era dynamics rather than some new thing like AI,” he told NPR. “These companies are adjusting to more normal conditions after overexpanding when demand surged during lockdowns.”

In other words, the AI narrative is a convenient distraction from the truth: most companies mistook short-term spikes for long-term trends and staffed up like e-commerce would never slow down. Now that things have normalized, those roles are looking less like strategic investments and more like expensive mistakes.

Let’s be clear: AI will eventually eliminate some jobs. But not the ones being cut right now.

We’re not seeing massive layoffs in robotic process automation or machine learning ops. We’re seeing cuts in marketing, recruiting, HR, customer service, and operations. These aren’t roles AI has conquered. They’re roles leadership doesn’t know what to do with when growth stalls.

The narrative doesn’t match the reality. But in a world where perception is performance, that doesn’t really matter.

Executives aren’t using AI to replace jobs. They’re using it to justify layoffs they were already planning. It’s a classic case of management by scapegoat. And right now, AI is wearing the horns.

I’ll Be Back….Eventually.

The post-pandemic labor market was supposed to be a white-collar paradise. Remote work was the norm. Salaries were up. Candidates ghosted employers, not the other way around.

But now? The balance has shifted.

The companies that once begged for talent are now slow-walking interview processes and ghosting applicants by the hundreds. The same hiring managers who bragged about 30% team growth in 2021 are now quietly folding roles into one another and praying nobody notices.

And for all the talk about “talent shortages”, job seekers are noticing the silence. Applications are up, interviews are down, and offers are rarer than verified Glassdoor reviews that don’t mention “toxic culture.”

If this week’s layoffs are any indicator, the white-collar labor market isn’t just cooling. It’s calcifying. And if recent history is any guide, the layoffs won’t stop when earnings

Retail, finance, media, and even healthcare are all quietly trimming. The difference is in the optics. Some are loud about it. Others bury the cuts in departmental “restructuring” or quietly sunset roles under the guise of “strategic shift.”

Eventually, the hiring freeze will thaw. It always does. But the market that emerges won’t look like the one we remember.

Roles will be narrower. Budgets tighter. Career paths less defined. Employers will expect more with less. Job seekers will have to settle for less with more hoops to jump through.

And AI? It’ll keep doing what it’s been doing all along – serving as a glorified Excel macro while executives pretend it’s Skynet. Until then, buckle up. The only thing colder than the job market right now is the leadership logic driving it.

Blame the bots all you want. But the real threat to your job isn’t artificial intelligence.

It’s actual incompetence.