October 21, 2026

Is This the Beginning Of the End?

Every time another company announces layoffs, I have the same question. Is this the beginning of the end for working people, or is it the same shit we've been watching for years with a new explanation attached?

Right now, the explanation everyone seems to reach for is AI. Which may be part of it. I just don't think it explains the whole thing.

Companies were perfectly capable of firing thousands of people before a chatbot could write a meeting summary. They didn't need a breakthrough in machine learning to discover that payroll costs money.

The shareholders would like another number

A company spends money growing, expanding, investing in a new direction, or doing whatever it was very confident about six months ago. Then results come around and suddenly the conversation is about efficiency.

Apparently there is always a more efficient version of the company, and it suspiciously involves fewer people getting paid.

If revenue isn't growing fast enough, cutting ongoing payroll is one way to try to improve future margins. It doesn't require inventing a better product or persuading another person to buy something. It requires someone to make a spreadsheet smaller.

That doesn't mean layoffs magically make the current quarter profitable. Severance and restructuring can create substantial upfront costs. You don't get to delete the employees and pretend all the other money you spent never happened.

And I can't prove that every layoff announcement near earnings is an attempt to impress shareholders. Companies have different reporting calendars, different problems, and occasionally actual reasons to reorganize. Timing by itself doesn't tell me what happened in the boardroom.

But I do think the incentive deserves more attention. Employees are asked to think about the company's long-term success while the company is explaining what it plans to do for the next set of results. The elusive shareholders never seem entirely satisfied. Somewhere there is always a man who would like the line to be a little steeper.

This didn't start with AI

One event I keep coming back to happened in 1981. Ronald Reagan fired more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers after giving them 48 hours to return to work. Their union was PATCO. Federal employees were legally prohibited from striking. [1]

But this wasn't a company trying to cut costs before an earnings call. It was a government firing workers during an illegal strike. And it definitely wasn't the invention of mass layoffs, which existed long before Reagan.

Still, I can see why people treat it as a signal about the balance of power. When the president can dismiss that many workers in a labor dispute, it's hard to imagine other employers watching without having a thought or two about what they might be able to do.

I can't blame every restructuring announcement forty-five years later on Reagan, though. There are recessions, mergers, changes in technology, and plenty of management decisions between those two things. History is unfortunately less convenient than having one guy you can point at.

And if an organization can decide you're no longer useful and move on, how much loyalty is it reasonable for that organization to expect?

We're a family until the family is an expense

There's this idea of an older employment bargain where you worked hard, stayed with one company, and the company looked after you. That experience existed for some people. It was never everybody's experience, and a long career at one employer isn't the same thing as a universal guarantee.

Even the tenure numbers don't give us a clean story about loyalty collapsing. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts median tenure with a current employer at 4.1 years in January 2026, up from 3.9 in 2024. That's a snapshot of how long people have been in their current jobs, not a measure of how many stayed somewhere their entire career. [2]

So I don't think I can say layoffs caused the death of company loyalty. But if a company can let you go whenever keeping you no longer makes financial sense, it's borderline idiotic to expect you to ignore the same calculation when another company offers you more money.

You can't explain your own decision as business and then treat mine as a betrayal. We are apparently both doing business. I just have a less impressive email signature.

And not every leader handles a bad year by immediately cutting staff. Nintendo's Satoru Iwata publicly argued in 2013 that short-term layoffs could damage morale and make it harder to create good games. Nintendo also reported management salary cuts and no annual bonus during that difficult period. Cutting executive pay won't cover every payroll shortfall, obviously. But at least the people making the decisions were giving something up too. [3]

There are alternatives involving hours, too. California's Work Sharing program allows participating employers to temporarily reduce hours and wages instead of laying people off, with partial unemployment benefits for eligible workers. That's still a sacrifice for employees. It's also different from telling a group of people their jobs have disappeared. [4]

Then came the next boogeyman

AI does have some merit as an explanation. I'm not going to pretend that giving companies access to tools that can automate parts of a job won't affect how many people they think they need.

But automating part of a job and eliminating the whole job are different things. Someone may still need to check the output, handle the situation the software gets wrong, or do the parts that were never in the neat little demo.

And calling a team “bloated” after you hired everyone is a pretty convenient way to make the hiring decision sound like the employees' fault.

Challenger, Gray & Christmas's September 2026 report says employers cited AI in 120,136 announced job cuts through September, about 21% of the total. But those are the reasons employers gave. It doesn't mean someone checked all 120,136 jobs and found an AI doing each one. [5]

The same report says total announced cuts through September were down 39% from the first nine months of 2025, while technology-sector cuts were up 54%. So even “layoffs are getting worse” needs a little more detail. Worse where? Compared with when? Looking at tech headlines alone doesn't tell us what every worker in the country is experiencing.

I think AI can be a real tool for cutting labor, a reason to rethink future hiring, and a very useful explanation for decisions a company might have made anyway. Which of those is happening probably depends on the company.

The part that worries me is who doesn't get hired back

My concern is that the other half of the cycle could get much weaker. A company cuts jobs, eventually starts growing again, and needs people. But what if this time it decides it can get by without bringing nearly as many people back?

I could be wrong about that. I don't know what hiring in the new year will look like. But I think fewer openings could be a much quieter way for AI to affect workers than a dramatic announcement saying everyone has been replaced.

In March 2026, the Chicago Fed found that much of the recent upward pressure in its unemployment measure came from slower job finding, with layoffs and other separations relatively stable by comparison. They were looking at data through February, and they weren't saying AI caused it. But people were already struggling to find the next job without a huge rise in layoffs. [6]

Then you have the bullshit ghost job postings. The company appears to be hiring. You spend an evening adjusting your resume, retyping everything that's already on the resume into a form, and trying to explain your deep personal connection to inventory management. Meanwhile, there may not be a job waiting for anyone.

Greenhouse reported in 2024 that 18–22% of postings on its own platform were classified as ghost jobs in a given quarter. That isn't most jobs, and it isn't a measurement of the entire job market. A role going unfilled also doesn't automatically prove the employer posted it dishonestly. Hiring plans can change. But there is enough here that I don't think applicants are imagining the problem. [7]

It's like matching with a hot girl on Hinge who says she wants to go out, but really she's keeping you around for attention until she goes back to her ex. Except this girl is average. And she's asking for a cover letter.

I wouldn't assume that most new-year job listings are fake just to make a company look like it's expanding. That's a much bigger claim than the evidence supports. But a careers page full of openings isn't proof that all the people who were laid off are about to be replaced, either.

So is this the beginning of the end?

For some roles that are especially easy to automate, probably the beginning of a much harder period. I don't think it makes sense to say every affected job was always doomed, though. Some work changes, some gets moved around, and some companies will find out that the remaining employees cannot, in fact, do absolutely everything.

As cliche as it sounds, this probably is another shift. Or PIVOT, if someone needs to put it on a slide.

The pressure to cut costs isn't new. AI may change how far companies think they can push it and how few people they need when they expand again. That's the part I'm worried about. A company doesn't need to replace your whole profession to make the next job harder to find.

At 34, part of me is grateful I'm not trying to get my first proper job right now. Which is a pretty grim thing to be grateful for. “At least I got some experience before they started automating the jobs you're supposed to get experience in.”

I don't think the evidence says work is about to end. I do think younger workers could be walking into a shit storm if companies expect experienced people while getting rid of the places they're supposed to start.

And I don't find “just learn AI” especially reassuring if the person saying it hasn't explained what they'll actually be hiring people to do.

Sources and notes

Published October 21, 2026. The argument and forecasts are my interpretation. The logo collage illustrates the broader corporate layoff discussion; it is not a claim that every pictured company announced cuts together or for the same reason.

1. Miller Center — Reagan vs Air Traffic Controllers; National Archives Reagan Library — strike and federal employment law context.
2. Bureau of Labor Statistics — Employee Tenure in 2026. Current-employer tenure is not completed career length or a direct measure of loyalty.
3. Nintendo — June 2013 shareholder Q and A on layoffs and morale; management pay reductions.
4. California EDD — Work Sharing Program.
5. Challenger, Gray & Christmas — September 2026 report released October 1. Figures are announced plans and cited reasons, not a count of independently verified AI replacements.
6. Chicago Fed — March 2026 analysis of the low-hire low-fire labor market.
7. Greenhouse — 2024 State of Job Hunting. The platform classification is not an estimate that most listings across the economy are fraudulent.