January
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News / labor
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1 min read
Fire 290 People, Then Wave a Million Dollars at the Survivors
Read more . . . →ClickUp just cut 290 people — 22% of the company — and the CEO announced it on X like he was shipping a feature. Zeb Evans calls the new structure a “100x org”: roughly 3,000 internal AI agents that now outnumber his remaining humans three to one. The money saved by firing nearly a quarter of the staff doesn’t go back to customers or get banked for a rainy day. It goes to the people who survived the cut, in the form of salary bands that climb to a million dollars a year in cash. Get laid off, or get...
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1 min read
Salesforce Replaced the Engineers. The Salespeople Are Fine.
Read more . . . →Salesforce didn’t hire a single engineer last year. Not one. Marc Benioff — $145 billion company, personal net worth north of $10 billion — stood up and told the world that AI handles the coding now, so why pay humans to do it? Productivity’s up 30%, he said, clearly pleased with himself. Zero new engineers in fiscal year 2026. That’s the headline he volunteered. That’s the thing he thought was worth bragging about. But here’s what he made sure to mention in the same breath: sales is booming. Nearly 20% more salespeople hired. Because someone still needs to walk into...
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1 min read
No Tax on Overtime. Also No Overtime.
Read more . . . →The Big Beautiful Bill is bragging about “no tax on overtime.” Zero percent tax on overtime pay — a real thing they announced as a worker win. What they didn’t announce, in the same breath, is that the Department of Labor just proposed a rule making it dramatically easier to call your employees “independent contractors.” Independent contractors don’t get overtime. They don’t get minimum wage. They don’t get workers’ comp or unemployment. There’s no tax on overtime when there’s no overtime to tax. This isn’t an accident. The rule rolls back Biden’s 2024 contractor classification protections — the rule that...
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1 min read
Fired on a Promise
Read more . . . →A Harvard Business Review survey of over 1,000 executives found something that should probably be front-page news: companies aren’t laying off workers because AI replaced them. They’re laying off workers because AI might replace them someday. That’s the deal now. You didn’t lose your job to a machine — you lost it to a PowerPoint slide about a machine. 113,863 workers in tech and adjacent industries are out in 2026 so far. 819 a day. Meanwhile CFOs are privately admitting AI layoffs will run 9x higher than what they’re telling the public. The productivity gains they promised haven’t materialized —...
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1 min read
LIRR Workers Are on Strike and Good for Them
Read more . . . →3,500 Long Island Rail Road workers walked off the job at midnight, shutting down the country’s busiest commuter rail for the first time in over 30 years. The MTA offered 9.5% over three years. The workers asked for 16% over four years to keep up with inflation. Everyone’s going to tell them they should feel bad about this. The MTA runs on a $21 billion annual budget. It took a full service shutdown to get wages taken seriously. These workers went thirty years without striking, kept the trains running through the pandemic and every fare hike that followed. The city...
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1 min read
Walmart cut 1,000 corporate jobs and pretended it wasn't about AI
Read more . . . →Walmart is the largest employer on earth and they just cut about a thousand corporate jobs in product, design, and tech. The internal memo was co-signed by the exec who runs “AI acceleration.” The memo somehow forgot to mention AI. They called it “platform consolidation,” which is the new corporate way of saying we bought software that does your job and we’re hoping you don’t read the news. The tell is what they’re still hiring for. Cashiers. Stockers. Warehouse pickers. The salaried middle gets the slide deck and a flight to Bentonville if they want to reapply for their own...
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1 min read
$725 Billion for AI, Severance for Everyone Else
Read more . . . →Coinbase just fired 700 people — 14% of its staff — and CEO Brian Armstrong described it as “building an intelligence, with humans around the edge.” Humans around the edge. You’re no longer a worker. You’re a decorative border on a product. Big Tech collectively committed $725 billion to AI this year — Amazon $200B, Microsoft $190B, Meta up to $145B — while burning through 80,000 workers in Q1 alone. Human salaries are the one cost flexible enough to cut fast enough to fund the buildout. Oracle made workers train the AI that replaced them. Not as a metaphor. They...
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1 min read
The Ghost of Spirit Airlines
Read more . . . →Spirit Airlines is gone. Not “restructuring,” not “emerging stronger” — actually gone. Yellow planes parked in the Mojave, gates absorbed by Delta and United, flight attendants told to file unemployment claims via a QR code on the breakroom wall. The closest thing America had to a working-class national carrier just bled out in bankruptcy court while everyone pretended this was inevitable. It wasn’t. The DOJ blocked the JetBlue merger to “protect competition,” which sounded reasonable right up until competition turned out to mean letting hedge funds peck at Spirit’s bones for two years until the carcass collapsed on its own....
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1 min read
3,000 Rallies Today Because the Tariff Revolution Was a Scam
Read more . . . →Three thousand May Day rallies across the country today. Five hundred labor unions marching. The National Education Association — three million members — calling a national walkout. The slogan is “Workers Over Billionaires,” which is apparently still a controversial position in 2026. Trump said tariffs would bring the factories “roaring back.” A year later, 100,000 manufacturing jobs are gone. A Kearney report confirmed the tariffs didn’t drive reshoring or reduce import dependence. What they did was hand every American household a $1,500 tax bill — the largest tariff increase as a share of GDP since 1993. The factories didn’t come...
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1 min read
Snap Fires 1,000 So a 2.5% Shareholder Can Feel Good
Read more . . . →A hedge fund called Irenic Capital bought 2.5% of Snap, put up a website named savesnapnow.com, and uploaded a PowerPoint titled “6 Steps to 7X.” Two weeks later, Snap fired a thousand people. The stock jumped. Evan Spiegel got on the earnings call and described it as “a new way of working,” which translates from billionaire into English as “we figured out we can stop paying a thousand people and the market will applaud.” This is the whole model now. You don’t have to own the company to gut it. You buy a slice of the cap table, post a...
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