A new and far-reaching wave of mass layoffs is sweeping the United States, marking a decisive escalation in the ruling class’s assault on the working class.
Two of America’s largest corporations, Amazon and UPS, have announced massive new cuts within days of each other. Amazon plans to eliminate roughly 16,000 corporate and technology jobs, bringing total layoffs since last autumn to approximately 30,000, as it restructures operations around artificial intelligence and automation.
UPS has announced plans to eliminate up to 30,000 additional jobs in 2026 through its so-called “Network of the Future,” a sweeping consolidation into fewer, highly automated mega-hubs. These cuts come on top of the 48,000 jobs UPS eliminated in 2025, underscoring the scale of the destruction underway in logistics and transportation.
According to the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, US employers eliminated more than 1.2 million jobs in 2025, the highest level since the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Layoffs surged in the final quarter of the year, while hiring collapsed to its lowest level since 2010.
The jobs massacre is accelerating in the opening weeks of 2026. A Business Insider survey of announced job cuts in early 2026 cites layoffs at Google, Microsoft, Meta, Salesforce and IBM in technology; Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo in finance; Walmart and Target in retail and logistics; Disney, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery in media and entertainment; and Boeing, General Electric and 3M in manufacturing.
In addition, GM and Ford have laid off thousands of workers at EV assembly and battery plants in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee, while Tyson Foods has eliminated 5,000 jobs in Nebraska and Texas.
In the past, major rounds of layoffs were typically associated with economic downturns, where companies claimed they had no choice but to shed jobs to survive. Today, however, the jobs massacre is being carried out amid record-breaking corporate earnings and the extraordinary enrichment of executives and shareholders.
Amazon made $56.4 billion in profits in the first nine months of 2025 alone, and the company’s third quarter revenue in 2025 was $180 billion, up approximately 13 percent over the previous year. For its part, UPS reported $5.5 billion in net income last year.
The net worth of Amazon founder and executive chair Jeff Bezos increased by $15 billion in 2025 alone, reaching $268 billion. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy received over $40 million in total compensation in 2024, the last year figures are available, a 37 percent increase over the previous year. Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services, received $32.8 million; Douglas Herrington, CEO of Worldwide Amazon Stores, received $34.2 million; and Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky received $25.7 million. UPS CEO Carol Tomé, meanwhile, was awarded $19 million in total compensation in 2024.
These staggering sums expose the irreconcilable conflict between a tiny corporate elite that owns and controls society’s wealth and the broad mass of workers, who are treated as disposable serfs to be cast aside when no longer deemed “efficient.”
Amazon and UPS are deploying automated warehouses, AI-driven logistics and algorithmic management to eliminate jobs, impose brutal speedup and extract greater profits from a shrinking workforce. Revolutionary technologies, which in a rational society would be used to eliminate exhausting and dangerous labor, poverty and social misery, are under capitalism transformed into weapons against workers.
According to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, AI could displace half of all entry-level white collar jobs within the next one to five years, push unemployment to 10–20 percent and create “a permanent class of unemployed or very low-paid workers.”
There is mounting anger and resistance in the United States and internationally. This opposition has already found expression in a growing wave of strikes and protests. More than 46,000 nurses and healthcare workers have launched walkouts in New York City, California and Hawaii to demand increased staffing and improved coverage. Thirty thousand oil refinery workers are preparing for a national strike when contracts expire on February 1, fighting unsafe conditions and AI-driven job cuts.
The principal obstacle confronting this resistance is the trade union apparatus. Far from defending jobs and living standards, the Teamsters, the United Auto Workers and other unions have collaborated in the jobs slaughter while blocking any unified struggle by their members.
After signing contracts in 2023 that paved the way for mass layoffs at UPS and throughout the auto industry, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien and UAW President Shawn Fain have emerged as leading proponents of Trump’s tariffs and economic nationalism. This nationalist poison divides workers internationally while providing political cover for corporate restructuring and war preparations.
The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) calls on workers to build new organizations of struggle—rank-and-file committees—in every single factory, warehouse, delivery center and workplace. These committees must take the initiative in resisting job cuts and transferring decision-making power from the pro-corporate union apparatus to workers on the shop floor.
The central demand of these committees must be: No job cuts! No layoffs! Not a single worker should be thrown into unemployment to boost corporate profits. The IWA-RFC urges workers to reject the supposed “right” of billion-dollar corporations to destroy livelihoods in pursuit of shareholder returns. The working class must assert its own social rights—the right to a secure, safe and well-paid job, the right to healthcare, housing and education.
To enforce these rights, workers must fight for democratic control over employment, safety and production. If automation and new technology are introduced, they must be used to improve working conditions—not eliminate jobs. If production is reduced, the workweek must be shortened with no loss in pay to guarantee full employment.
The mass layoffs by Amazon, UPS and other corporations make clear that the basic decisions governing society cannot be left in the hands of the financial oligarchy. The major corporations—built through the labor of millions and operating across the globe—must be placed under public ownership and democratic control. They must be run not for private profit but to meet human needs.
This struggle must be guided by an international strategy uniting workers across borders against global corporations. Amazon’s layoffs are hitting workers in the UK, India and Latin America. Swedish telecom giant Ericsson is cutting 1,600 jobs at home; Lenovo and Baidu are eliminating thousands of tech jobs in China; and in Germany, 50,000 auto jobs were wiped out in 2025 alone, with 41 percent of manufacturing and industrial firms expecting further cuts in 2026. Central to the fight for international working class unity is opposition to the witch-hunting of immigrants and to imperialist war.
The industrial struggles of the working class must be fused with a political fight against dictatorship and for democratic rights. The ruling class understands that permanent insecurity combined with obscene inequality is generating explosive resistance. In response, it is increasingly resorting to dictatorial methods to impose its agenda.
In the United States, this finds its sharpest expression in the Trump administration’s drive toward authoritarian rule. The state murders of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis mark a qualitative escalation: extrajudicial executions by federal agents operating with impunity.
It is significant that the same billionaire owners of Meta, Google, Apple and other tech giants who are destroying jobs are also assisting the Trump administration’s crackdown on apps and digital networks used by residents in Minneapolis and across the country to track ICE activity and defend immigrant neighbors and co-workers from kidnappings and violence.
The message from the ruling class is clear: Resistance to layoffs, deportations or social inequality will be met with force. The working class must respond by uniting its fight for social rights with the defense of democratic rights and the struggle against dictatorship. To secure its interests, it must take political power, expropriate the corporate oligarchy, and reorganize society on socialist foundations.