2025 will go down as one of the most devastating years of mass layoffs in recent history. More than 1 million jobs were eliminated in the United States alone, making it one of the largest waves of job destruction of the 21st century—and the largest to take place without an officially declared recession or financial crash.
The ruling class has used the year to carry out a deliberate restructuring of production, accelerating automation, artificial intelligence and global reorganization to slash labor costs and vastly enrich a tiny financial oligarchy.
According to the job-outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, employers announced more than 1.1 million job cuts through November 2025, a 54 percent increase from the same period last year. This was the highest total since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 and only the sixth time since 1993 that job cuts exceeded 1.1 million during the first 11 months of a year. These figures understate the real scale of devastation, excluding many temporary layoffs, contract non-renewals and unreported firings.
The destruction of jobs extends across every major sector of the economy. Logistics and transportation were hit particularly hard. UPS announced the elimination of 48,000 jobs in 2025 as part of a sweeping restructuring that closed facilities, automated operations and intensified exploitation for those who remained.
Tech giants, long promoted as engines of “innovation,” led all industries in layoffs, with more than 153,000 job cuts announced through November, up 17 percent from the same point in 2024. AI and automation were used to implement thousands of layoffs at Microsoft (15,000), Intel (15,000), Amazon (14,000), Verizon (13,000) and HP (4-6,000) and other corporations, while funneling billions into stock buybacks and executive compensation.
The entertainment and media industry recorded another brutal year, with over 17,000 jobs cut across television, film, broadcast, news and streaming in the first 11 months of the year, up 18 percent from last year. In food processing, consumer products and retail, Nestle announced 16,000 jobs cuts; Tyson is closing a beef packing plant in Nebraska, cutting 3,200 jobs; and Procter & Gamble is cutting 7,000 jobs and Target 1,800 while maintaining profitability and rewarding shareholders.
In the auto industry, 2025 exposed the fraud of the so-called “electric vehicle transition” under capitalism. General Motors implemented deep job cuts across its EV and battery operations, including more than 1,200 permanent layoffs at its flagship Factory Zero assembly plant in Detroit as production was slashed from two shifts to one. Hundreds more were laid off or placed on indefinite furlough at Ultium Cells battery plants in Ohio and Tennessee.
Ford is ending production of its F-150 Lightning EV pickup, scrapping its Blue Oval battery joint venture in Kentucky, at the cost of 1,600 jobs. Job cuts are accelerating in construction equipment and truck manufacturing, with the CASE IH plant set to close in Burlington, Iowa and 100 jobs lost at the Volvo Mack drive train facility in Hagerstown, Maryland.
Despite the official GDP numbers hailed by Trump, economists say that nearly half of the states in the US have already seen levels of job losses and declining output consistent with a recession. Oregon, for example, reported nearly 9,000 mass layoffs in 2025—a figure that surpassed the pace of job losses during the worst years of the Great Recession of 2008-09.
The jobs massacre is not limited to the US. Across Europe, industrial layoffs accelerated, with German manufacturers announcing job cuts at a pace of roughly 10,000 per month. In the auto sector, VW, Bosch, ZF and other manufacturers slashed more than 50,000 jobs while Ford is cutting 1,000 jobs at its Cologne EV plant in Germany, as part of its plans to eliminate 4,000 jobs across Europe by 2027. Major corporations are also carrying out sweeping restructuring plans in Britain, France and Italy.
The working class is being told that this devastation is inevitable, the result of “market forces,” “technological change” or “global competition.” In reality, it is the conscious policy of corporations and capitalist governments confronting deepening economic contradictions. Artificial intelligence and automation—technologies, which under a rationally organized society could radically reduce the workweek and eliminate hazardous, repetitive tasks—are being weaponized to destroy jobs and intensify exploitation.
Warnings of an even greater wave of job cuts in 2026 are explicit. Studies indicate that AI can already replace work equivalent to more than 10 percent of the US workforce, and leading figures within the tech industry openly predict that millions more jobs will be eliminated as companies pursue “AI savings.” Business journals now speak candidly of a future of “jobless growth,” in which productivity and profits soar while employment stagnates or declines.
This assault is inseparable from the broader crisis of capitalism. The driving out of living labor—the sole source of surplus value—from the production process only deepens the system’s contradictions. Corporations seek to offset this through speedup, mass layoffs, trade war policies and the intensified exploitation of those who remain employed. The turn toward economic nationalism and militarism, including the escalation of conflict with China, is bound up with the same crisis and the same effort to impose its costs on the working class.
The grotesque social outcome is a society in which mass unemployment and insecurity coexist with obscene wealth accumulation. Wall Street expects stock markets to continue their meteoric rise in 2026, even as millions lose their livelihoods. The personal fortune of Elon Musk surged to roughly $750 billion in 2025, symbolizing the vast transfer of social wealth upward that accompanies mass layoffs and austerity.
The trade-union bureaucracies have functioned throughout this process as instruments of corporate management. They accept the supposed “right” of the corporations to eliminate jobs, limit their response to obtaining severance packages and early retirement schemes, and actively suppress any struggle by workers to defend their livelihoods. Worst of all, the heads of the United Auto Workers and Teamsters promote nationalist poison, aligning themselves with the Trump administration’s trade-war policies and blaming workers in other countries and immigrant workers for layoffs imposed by transnational corporations.
Yet 2025 was also marked by a renewed growth of class struggle. In the US, Boeing workers carried out a four-month strike, demonstrating deep anger and militancy despite efforts by the union apparatus to isolate and contain the struggle. Across Europe, general strikes erupted in Belgium, Italy and Portugal against austerity and attacks on social rights. In Latin America and other regions, mass protests and strikes underscored the global character of working-class resistance.
These struggles will intensify in 2026. Dozens of major contracts are set to expire in the United States alone, including agreements covering 30,000 oil refinery and petrochemical workers at the end of January, thousands of auto parts workers at Dana, Nexteer and other suppliers, and large sections of healthcare, education and logistics workers. Corporations are preparing to use these negotiations to impose job cuts, automation and concessions.
The decisive question is leadership and perspective.
In 2025, the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees advanced a fundamentally different strategy. It worked to build independent organizations of workers, outside and against the control of the union bureaucracies, linking struggles across industries and national borders and connecting the fight for jobs and safety to a broader political struggle against capitalism, dictatorship and war.
In the United States, rank-and-file committees helped spearhead worker-led investigations into deaths on the job, exposing the reality that many so-called “accidents” are in fact social murder. The public inquiry into the killing of Stellantis worker Ronald Adams Sr. at the Dundee Engine Complex broke through management and UAW cover-ups, establishing the principle that workers themselves must control investigations into unsafe conditions. At the US Postal Service, the IWA-RFC has initiated a rank-and-file investigation into the deaths of postal workers Nick Acker and Russell Scruggs Jr., opposing management cover-ups and the complicity of union officials who sought to bury the truth.
Internationally, the IWA-RFC intervened against union-backed restructuring in the German auto industry, opposing plant closures and concession schemes at Ford, Mercedes and other manufacturers. It supported rank-and-file struggles against the “Amazonification” of public services, including at postal operations in Canada and the UK, and aided workers in Turkey, education and healthcare in building independent committees to oppose austerity and speedup.
The defense of jobs, safety and living standards requires new forms of organization—democratic, militant and international in scope. And economic struggles cannot be separated from the fight for political power by the working class.
Workers must assert their basic social rights, including the right to a secure, well-paid job. Job cuts must be opposed with the demand for a shorter workweek with no loss of pay, so that technological advances benefit society as a whole. Workers displaced by automation must receive guaranteed income, healthcare and pensions.
This struggle must advance toward workers’ control over production and safety, enforced through rank-and-file committees with the power to halt production to protect workers lives. Ultimately, it requires the expropriation of the banks and major corporations, transforming them into publicly owned utilities democratically controlled by the working class, and the conversion of military production into socially useful labor.
Central to this fight is the conscious appropriation of technology by the working class itself. Socialism AI represents an important initiative in this regard, enabling workers to turn the very technologies used by corporations to destroy jobs into tools for political education, organization and global coordination. Rather than allowing artificial intelligence to remain an instrument of exploitation, workers must seize it as a weapon in the struggle for socialist consciousness and international unity.
Rank-and-file committees must be built now, linking workers across plants, industries and borders. Looming contract fights must be unified into a common struggle against layoffs, automation and austerity. Above all, workers must take up a socialist political perspective, breaking with all factions of the capitalist class and fighting for their own independent interests.
2025 laid bare the logic of capitalism with brutal clarity. 2026 will determine whether the working class responds with organization, international unity and conscious struggle—or whether the ruling class succeeds in imposing a new era of mass unemployment and social reaction.