On Tuesday, Amazon, UPS and Paramount Global announced plans to eliminate at least 50,000 jobs, part of a continuing wave of mass layoffs that has already wiped out nearly a million positions this year. The corporations justify the cuts as “efficiency gains” and “AI transformation,” even as they post record profits and soaring stock prices.
The Seattle Times reported that Amazon will cut 14,000 corporate positions this year with more cuts coming in 2026. Despite “strong business results,” Senior Vice President Beth Galetti said in a blogpost, the company must be “organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership.” In short, even huge profits are being used to rationalize a global purge of jobs.
According to Business Insider, the cuts span Amazon’s retail, human-resources, logistics, advertising, Audible, Devices and Fire TV divisions, with remaining workers told to “lean in on AI.” Internal documents obtained by the New York Times and analyzed by the World Socialist Web Site show that Amazon plans to automate as much as 75 percent of its operations, eliminating between 500,000 and 600,000 jobs over the next several years. By 2033, the company expects to double sales while avoiding hundreds of thousands of new hires.
Amazon’s global downsizing is also hitting its European workforce. In Germany—one of its largest markets—the company has notified works councils of impending cuts affecting warehouse and corporate staff, and employees have reported being locked out of company systems before termination notices were issued.
Job destruction is reaching Amazon’s delivery network as well. The Seattle Times reported that 110 drivers in Kitsap County, west of Seattle, lost their jobs when Amazon ended its contract with the local Delivery Service Partner Jarde. The company claimed it “regularly evaluates our network,” but the subcontracting system allows Amazon to shed drivers while hiding the real scale of layoffs.
UPS, meanwhile, has already eliminated 48,000 jobs this year—34,000 in operations and 14,000 in management. In an earnings call with investors Tuesday, CEO Carol Tomé boasted that the company was “positioned to run the most efficient peak in our history” and said the reductions were part of a strategy to “align capacity with demand” and “find new opportunities to bring costs down.” UPS posted higher-than-expected quarterly profits even as parcel volumes fell. The layoffs come just one year after the Teamsters bureaucracy hailed its contract as “historic,” claiming it would protect jobs. In fact, management is carrying out one of the largest downsizings in company history.
Paramount Global is also in the midst of a sweeping jobs bloodletting, targeting roughly 1,000 employees across corporate offices, streaming operations and its film and television divisions. The cuts follow earlier rounds at CBS, MTV Entertainment and Paramount+ production units in Los Angeles and New York.
Workers posting on TheLayoff.com described chaotic communication and mounting anxiety. One wrote, “The goal is to get many of us to the point where we can’t take the stress anymore and walk out on our own. That saves them money on severance.” Another said remote staff outside major cities are being cut first to reduce salary costs. The layoffs come amid renewed merger speculation involving Warner Bros. Discovery, as executives slash payroll to make the studio more attractive to investors.
Forbes summarized the carnage: “It’s only Tuesday, and this week has already seen more than 50,000 corporate employees at some of the nation’s largest companies let go.”
The auto industry is also shedding jobs at a rapid pace. General Motors has laid off several hundred engineers and designers at its Warren Technical Center in Michigan just days after reporting sharply higher profits and a major stock-price jump. GM is also idling and “rebalancing” electric-vehicle production, with temporary and permanent layoffs at its Detroit “Factory Zero” and likely closure of its CAMI Assembly plant in Ontario.
Ford has announced up to 1,000 job cuts at its EV facility in Cologne, Germany, and further reductions across Europe after eliminating nearly 4,000 positions last year. Stellantis is cutting US engineering and software staff while demanding up to 40 percent labor-cost reductions to “stay competitive.” Across all three companies, management invokes automation and “realignment for EV demand” as pretexts for mass job destruction even as they hand billions to investors in dividends and stock buybacks.
Multinational corporations are carrying out similar cuts across industries. Lufthansa, Germany’s largest airline, is eliminating 4,000 positions by 2030, citing “digitalization and the increased use of artificial intelligence.” Salesforce cut 4,000 jobs worldwide in September; Microsoft and Meta are slashing thousands across Europe and Asia while expanding AI data centers. Around the world, employers are wielding the same justification—“efficiency” and “AI transformation”—to destroy jobs and boost profits.
Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi admitted that 23 state economies in the US were contracting, just 16 were seeing economic growth, albeit with slower momentum, and 12 were “treading water.” Earlier, Zandi said, “The way people perceive their own economy, their own finances, are very consistent with the recession.”
The mass firings coincide with the Trump administration’s purge of nearly 300,000 federal employees under its “reduction-in-force” program and the slashing of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) food stamps for up to 44 million people. A senior citizen living in public housing in Portland told the WSWS that pantries “can’t keep up with this administration’s theater of cruelty.” Food banks report empty shelves, while inflation—driven higher by Trump’s tariffs—erodes what remains of workers’ incomes.
Another worker who wrote into the WSWS said: “I work at a senior center, many of whom are lower income individuals. At the end of the month, they have a week long bingo bucks shopping thing, where they trade in the prize coupons they win daily for trinkets, toiletries, and so on... this last week a lot of it has been for food.”
The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported October 2 that employers have announced 946,000 job cuts so far in 2025, the highest since the first pandemic year. Retail layoffs are up 203 percent over 2024, and holiday hiring plans are the weakest since 2009. More than 17,000 cuts were directly attributed to artificial intelligence and 20,000 more to “technological updates.”
What is unfolding is a coordinated class war, not a series of isolated restructurings. It spans logistics (Amazon, UPS), auto manufacturing, media (Paramount), tech (Microsoft, Salesforce, Meta), retail (Target), aviation (Lufthansa) and the public sector. Both corporate parties back it. Trump’s Project 2025 blueprint calls for mass federal layoffs, the dismantling of regulatory agencies, Social Security and other essential programs and the funneling of even more money into the hands of the corporate financial oligarchy and the build up for World War III.
As for the Democrats, they support “fiscal responsibility” and fear nothing more than the revolutionary potential of a mass movement of the working class against the fascist president and the economic and political domination of the oligarchy.
The trade union bureaucracies serve as accomplices. The Teamsters, who boasted of their “historic” UPS contract, are silent on the destruction of tens of thousands of jobs. The United Auto Workers under Shawn Fain promotes Trump’s nationalist trade program to divide US workers from their brothers and sisters in Canada, Mexico and around the world, while global auto companies carry out new rounds of mass layoffs. Far from defending the working class, the unions act as labor-management partners, suppressing resistance and isolating struggles.
To defend jobs and living standards, workers must create new organizations that they control to wage the class struggle. Rank-and-file committees must be built in every workplace—linking Amazon workers in the United States and Germany with UPS, auto, airline, media and public-sector workers worldwide. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) insists that every worker has the social right to a secure, good-paying and safe job, along with the right to health care, housing, education, leisure and culture.
These basic rights require a massive transformation of the political and economic structure of society. The only way to stop the destruction of millions of jobs is to end private capitalist ownership of Amazon and mega-billion dollar corporations, establish public ownership and democratic control of these vast conglomerates, and organize and direct their operations in a manner that serves social needs, not the self-enriching interests of Bezos and his fellow money-mad oligarchs.
The central issue is not artificial intelligence and automation but who controls this technology and who it must benefit. Under capitalism, automation is used as a weapon to slash jobs, drive down wages and funnel wealth to the financial elite. In the hands of the working class, the same technologies could shorten the workweek, end drudgery and unsafe working conditions and sharply raise living standards. Freed from private profit, they would make possible the rational, planned organization of production to meet social need rather than shareholder return. The alternative is clear: mass unemployment and destitution under capitalism or the socialist reorganization of society.