{"id":234261,"date":"2025-10-30T16:08:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-30T16:08:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/234261\/"},"modified":"2025-10-30T16:08:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-30T16:08:09","slug":"everyone-is-laying-people-off-this-week-researchers-say-theyre-going-to-regret-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/234261\/","title":{"rendered":"Everyone Is Laying People Off This Week. Researchers Say They&#8217;re Going to Regret It"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The nation\u2019s largest employers are doing a lot less employing lately. In recent weeks, Amazon announced it would <a href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/amazon-job-cuts-layoffs-cost-saving-measure-2025-10\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">cut 14,000 jobs<\/a>, Paramount <a href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/paramount-layoff-memo-1000-employees-ceo-david-ellison-2025-10\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">axed 1,000 people<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/2025\/10\/23\/target-layoffs-corporate-jobs-sales-slump.html\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Target let go of 1,800 employees<\/a>, UPS said it will start a purge of 14,000 people with the aim of <a href=\"https:\/\/nypost.com\/2025\/10\/28\/business\/ups-axes-48000-workers-in-sweeping-cost-cut-push-sparking-stock-surge\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">getting rid of 48,000 workers<\/a> in total, and Meta <a href=\"https:\/\/gizmodo.com\/meta-reportedly-laying-off-hundreds-from-its-ai-team-2000675723\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">laid off around 600 people<\/a> from its AI lab. All that is happening as we enter the <a href=\"https:\/\/gizmodo.com\/welcome-to-the-jobless-growth-economy-2000673236\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">\u201cjobless growth\u201d economy<\/a>, a world where no one is hiring but their profits keep climbing.<\/p>\n<p>As the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/economy\/jobs\/white-collar-jobs-ai-324b749c\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Wall Street Journal points out<\/a>, many of the jobs getting hit at the moment are white collar work: office jobs that offer a relatively comfortable lifestyle and, typically, room for growth. But at the moment, the job market is stuck in \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/news\/amazon-ups-layoffs-labor-market-jobs-economy\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">no hire, no fire<\/a>\u201d mode, meaning no one is coming in, no one is moving up, and no one is looking for other opportunities. Instead, the whole world is stagnant\u2014except those getting caught under the corporate axe as they try to boost their bottom line for the fourth quarter earnings report.<\/p>\n<p>As these jobs go away, the path into the world of work that once represented at least one route to the American Dream suddenly has no entry point and a much lower ceiling than it used to. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.axios.com\/2025\/09\/25\/jobs-market-ai-indeed-retail\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Job postings for entry-level and early career roles<\/a> are way down year over year. The market has <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/2025\/09\/07\/ai-entry-level-jobs-hiring-careers.html\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">pulled up the ladder<\/a> for people trying to get in on the lower rungs, and the prospect of climbing it is getting harrowing, too. A <a href=\"https:\/\/www.philadelphiafed.org\/community-development\/workforce-and-economic-development\/occupational-exposure-to-generative-artificial-intelligence-in-the-third-federal-reserve-district\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">recent report<\/a> from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that AI exposure is over three times higher for occupations that require a bachelor\u2019s degree compared with those that don\u2019t.<\/p>\n<p>The idea up in the C-suite is almost certainly that automation will be able to fill in those gaps, even though there\u2019s little to suggest that it will actually play out that way. According to a <a href=\"https:\/\/removepaywalls.com\/https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/ai-agents-are-terrible-freelance-workers\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">study done by the Center for AI Safety<\/a>, AI agents were only able to complete about 3% of the work assigned to them that humans can do reliably. Given that, it\u2019s little surprise that a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.forrester.com\/report\/predictions-2026-the-future-of-work\/RES185020\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">recent report<\/a> published by research and advisory firm Forrester found that more than half of all employers who cut workers and tried to replace them with AI regret the decision.<\/p>\n<p>But don\u2019t worry, they\u2019ll still come out ahead. The same report predicted that those companies would bring back human labor, just at lower wages and potentially by farming out roles to overseas workers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The nation\u2019s largest employers are doing a lot less employing lately. In recent weeks, Amazon announced it would&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":234262,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,1108,733,4308,4340,1371,11460,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-234261","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intellience","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-emerging-technologies","13":"tag-jobs","14":"tag-layoffs","15":"tag-technology","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom","18":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234261\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/234262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}