
US companies are still slashing jobs to reverse pandemic hiring boom
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The new era of corporate cost-cutting is hitting American workers with full force. Big companies from Amazon.com to UPS are slashing jobs, looking to shrink their head counts after years of breakneck growth.
Companies generously expanded their workforces during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 and doled out hefty raises, worried that moving too slowly might leave them with a shortage of skilled workers. Now, some companies say their hiring sprees went too far. Their biggest concerns today are bloat and runaway expenses.
“A lot of these companies found that they are too big," said Guy Berger, a senior fellow at the think tank Burning Glass Institute. Amazon said Wednesday that it would lay off an additional 16,000 corporate employees after laying off 14,000 workers in the fall. The combined cuts amount to around 10% of Amazon’s corporate workforce.
On Tuesday, UPS said it expected to slash 30,000 jobs this year, on top of 48,000 job cuts last year, saying the company needed to “right-size." Also on Tuesday, social-media company Pinterest said it planned to shrink its workforce by up to 15%. For months, corporate executives and labor economists have theorized about whether—and when—advances in artificial intelligence will lead to widespread layoffs. But that shoe has yet to meaningfully drop.
For the moment at least, the layoff story is centered on bloat. The sectors that recorded some of the top hiring surges in 2020 and 2021—tech and logistics—are now seeing the most layoffs. U.S.-based employers announced 1.2 million job cuts in 2025, the highest annual figure since 2020, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
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