The AI/Labor Report

About The AI/Labor Report

Daily news, analysis, and commentary about the most recent AI-related impact on jobs, the changing nature of work, and AI-influenced labor market trends in the United States, Europe, and Asia. ailabor.substack.com (https://ailabor.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

William R. Dodson

Category

news · news

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

14 Apr 2026

Latest episode

7 Jul 2026

Latest episodes

50 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   7 Jul 2026

   Microsoft cuts 4,800 jobs to fund the AI that replaced them; Ford quietly rehires the engineers AI couldn't; A judge says Workday can't hide behind its clients; Brussels delays AI hiring rules to 2027

   Microsoft opens its fiscal year with nearly 5,000 layoffs Microsoft kicked off its new fiscal year July 1st by cutting about 4,800 jobs, roughly 2 percent of its workforce. Xbox took the biggest hit, losing 1,600 people. Sales and consulting absorbed most of the rest. Chief People Officer Amy Coleman told staff the company is changing because “the world around it is changing.” That is a gentle way to describe a pattern you have seen from Microsoft before. The company cut jobs in May of last year too, and again in July. This time the cuts are smaller than last year’s, partly because a voluntary retirement program thinned the ranks earlier in the year. Microsoft says it has redeployed more than 4,000 employees into new roles over the past year. It is spending close to $190 billion on AI infrastructure (https://www.martincid.com/business/microsoft-layoffs-xbox-ai-5500-jobs-2/) this year, so the money is clearly going somewhere. It is just not going toward keeping these particular jobs. When the humans come back Three companies just showed you what happens when AI takes over a job it cannot actually do. Ford rehired, hired, or promoted 350 experienced engineers (https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/01/employers-who-laid-off-workers-for-ai-are-reversing-their-decisions.html) after its automated quality checks missed defects that human judgment would have caught. Ford then topped J.D. Power’s quality rankings for the first time since 2010. In Australia, Commonwealth Bank laid off more than 40 customer service workers and replaced them with an AI voice bot. Call volumes rose and the bank reversed the cuts. The union involved called it “a massive win.” IBM’s AI system handled 94 percent of routine HR requests just fine. The remaining 6 percent involved ethical judgment calls the system could not make, so IBM is now tripling its entry-level hiring. New survey data backs up the pattern. Robert Half found that 32 percent of U.S. hiring managers who cut a role for AI have already rehired for it. I would treat any figure above that as approximate until you check it against the original survey, since I found it reported secondhand. Cognizant bets on a shorter pyramid Cognizant is preparing to cut somewhere between 12,000 and 15,000 jobs worldwide under a plan called Project Leap, with India expected to feel most of it. CEO Ravi Kumar S has described the goal as a “broader and shorter pyramid,” meaning fewer layers of junior staff supporting senior people. The company has not confirmed a specific number of cuts. What it has confirmed is $230 million to $320 million in expected severance costs (https://www.news9live.com/technology/tech-news/cognizant-layoffs-15000-employees-project-leap-ai-shift-2968609), which is how outside analysts backed into the 12,000 to 15,000 estimate in the first place. India’s entry-level door keeps closing The freshers who once filled India’s IT industry are finding fewer seats. Staffing firm Xpheno reports (https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/story/it-hiring-falls-to-28-month-low-but-demand-for-ai-talent-remains-strong-535469-2026-06-08) entry-level tech postings fell 44 percent year over year. Reliance may have hired around 90,000 fewer new employees this fiscal year than last. TCS ended the year with 23,460 fewer people on staff. An analyst told Mint (https://letsdatascience.com/news/ril-cuts-new-hires-by-90000-in-fy26-f8a3807d), a business magazine, that firms are shifting toward workers in their 30s who already know the client relationships, rather than training newcomers from scratch. That is the same story you have heard about entry-level coding jobs in the U.S., just told in a different country with different numbers. Unions from four continents compare notes in Berlin Fifty union representatives from Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America met in Berlin recently to talk about AI at work (https://www.industriall-union.org/unions-shaping-future-of-work-ai/). Jacob Plat of the Dutch union FNV put the goal plainly: “digitalisation should be negotiated, not imposed.” The numbers they are working against are large. Roughly 83 million jobs are considered at risk from robotics by 2027. This was not a protest. It was closer to a planning session for how workers might get a seat at the table before the decisions get made instead of after. A court signals that AI vendors might share the legal exposure too SHRM reported in its article “The Workday AI Lawsuit Is a Wake-Up Call for HR” (https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/technology/workday-ai-lawsuit-wake-up-call-hr)A federal judge in California let key parts of a discrimination lawsuit against Workday move forward this year, and the reasoning behind that decision could reshape how HR technology companies see their legal risk. Judge Rita F. Lin ruled on June 22 that Workday’s screening tools can be treated as functioning on behalf of the companies that use them. That distinction matters because it means the software company itself, not just its clients, could face responsibility for outcomes the tools produce. That responsibility applies at least under California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act. Age, disability, and California-specific race discrimination claims can all proceed to the next stage. This ruling grew out of Mobley v. Workday, a case Derek Mobley filed after he says he was rejected from more than 100 jobs, often within minutes of applying. He argued the speed and pattern of rejections pointed to an automated system, not a human reviewer, making the calls. Workday has said its tools do not weigh age, race, or disability. A company spokesperson stated the technology looks only at job qualifications. A related case against a different company, Eightfold AI, raises a separate legal question. Plaintiffs there argue Eightfold’s tools should fall under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the law that normally governs background checks. The two cases differ, but together they point toward the same shift. Employers used to assume the software vendor absorbed most of the legal exposure for automated hiring decisions. Judges increasingly treat that assumption as wrong. This stage of the case means the claims can continue. It does not mean Workday has been found liable for anything. The next phase involves discovery and eventually a trial or settlement, so the final outcome remains open. Europe just gave itself more time The European Union had planned (https://knowledge.dlapiper.com/dlapiperknowledge/globalemploymentlatestdevelopments/2026/The-Digital-AI-Omnibus-Proposed-deferral-of-high-risk-AI-obligations-under-the-AI-Act) to require AI transparency and human oversight in hiring, firing, and promotion decisions starting August 2. The Council of the EU gave final approval on June 29 to push that deadline back to December 2, 2027. The measure still requires formal publication in the EU’s Official Journal, expected sometime in July 2026, before it takes legal effect. Once published, the protections European workers were expecting this summer will remain on hold for another year and a half. Get full access to The AI & Work Chronicle at ailabor.substack.com/subscribe (https://ailabor.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

2. 

   24 Jun 2026

   Meta's spy tool leaks the secrets it pilfered from workers; Oracle fires 21,000, spends $70 billion on machines; firms slash hardest, gain nothing; AI shuts the door to opportunity before you knock

   A pattern keeps showing up this year, and yesterday it got harder to argue with. A profitable company sheds thousands of workers, names AI as a reason in its own paperwork, then turns around and pours billions into AI hardware. Oracle just did exactly that. Oracle puts AI in writing Oracle cut about 21,000 jobs over the past year. The number matters, and so does where it came from. The company admitted in its own annual regulatory filing (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-22/oracle-layoffs-fueled-by-ai-reduces-workforce-by-21-000) that AI played a part. The filing says AI deployment “may continue to result in reductions to our workforce.” The cuts brought Oracle’s headcount down to roughly 141,000 from about 162,000 a year earlier. Some teams felt it far more than others. Revenue and Health Sciences saw reductions near 30% (https://cryptobriefing.com/oracle-workforce-declines-21000-ai-restructuring/), while cloud and AI teams were mostly spared. Oracle plans to spend around $70 billion this year building AI data centers (https://www.outlookbusiness.com/corporate/oracle-slashes-21000-jobs-as-tech-giant-warns-of-further-ai-driven-cuts) for customers like OpenAI. The company is cutting people and building machines in the same breath. Meta’s tracking program springs a leak We told you yesterday about Meta’s program that records employee keystrokes and mouse movements to train its AI. It seems, though, Meta paused the program after a data leak (https://www.engadget.com/2199458/meta-is-pausing-employee-tracking-program-after-it-let-the-whole-company-see-sensitive-data/) exposed sensitive worker information to the entire company. So, Meta did not stop surveilling workers because they objected to being watched. It stopped because the watching went wrong. Private conversations, performance data, and transcriptions became visible across the company (https://www.peoplematters.in/news/business/meta-suspends-workforce-ai-training-project-after-sensitive-employee-data-leak-50444). The program, launched in April, (https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/meta-pauses-ai-initiative-data-exposure-1804446) recorded keystrokes, mouse activity, and occasional screen content from US staff. A company that wants to read every click could not keep those clicks private. Workers noticed. Narrower On-ramps Here is a story about jobs that vanish before anyone gets laid off. A new report from Opportunity@Work warns that AI could wall off millions of “gateway jobs” (https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/skilled-workers-are-finally-gaining-ground-ai-will-decide-whether-they-keep-it-302807994.html) for workers without a four-year degree. Gateway jobs are the entry and mid-skill roles people, typically without college degrees, use to climb into better pay. The report counts up to 11 million of them exposed to AI losses. Read that as the group’s own estimate, since they advocate for these workers. The report notes that 33 states have agreed to drop degree requirements from public jobs. So, AI could open these doors wider or shut them, depending on how employers choose to use it. A lot of cuts, not much payoff Concurrently, tech layoffs are running at roughly 1,100 a day in 2026 (https://www.techtimes.com/articles/318466/20260616/tech-layoffs-hit-1115-day-2026-companies-cite-ai-cuts-fail-boost-returns.htm), close to double last year’s pace. Meta, Oracle, and Block all point to AI. A Gartner study of 350 firms found that the companies cutting the most showed no improvement in financial returns. So the layoffs are not obviously paying off. That gap is why some economists use the term “AI washing.” It describes firms blaming AI for cuts they wanted to make anyway. Treat the daily-rate figures as estimates from layoff trackers, not exact counts. The silent killer is slow hiring Layoffs grab headlines. The bigger shift for young workers isn’t making the front page of the news. Some economists argue that AI is hurting hiring more than it is driving firings (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ai-layoffs-hiring-entry-level-workers/), impacting junior staff the most. Goldman Sachs research found AI trimmed monthly payroll growth by around 16,000 jobs over the past year. Companies are not always cutting people. They are choosing not to add them. One organizational psychologist put the trap plainly. “The people who get laid off don’t necessarily get the next set of jobs, because the roles are different.” India’s AI experiment on steroids For a wider view, look at India. Infosys, TCS, and Wipro have each rolled Microsoft Copilot out to more than 100,000 workers, over 300,000 seats combined (https://www.bwpeople.in/article/infosys-tcs-and-wipro-scale-ai-adoption-to-more-than-300-000-employees-609725). Wipro says its performance AI review agent cut performance-review effort by nearly 70%. At the same time, these firms are thinning out without big announcements. They lean on delayed hiring and attrition instead. The Microsoft rollout reads like a press release, so take it with a grain of sale. Nevertheless, workers get AI tools dropped onto their desks, and the company gets to do more with fewer staff. To their credit, the firms are paying for retraining. Average learning hours at TCS rose past 120 per employee (https://www.hrkatha.com/news/ai-push-drives-surge-in-employee-learning-hours-report/) this year, with Infosys up 58%. Where this leaves us So, Oracle wrote AI into the official reason it cut 21,000 people, and a respected study found that the firms cutting hardest got nothing to show for it on the balance sheet. Companies are forming around a bet on AI, and the bet has not paid off yet for many of them. Workers, meanwhile, are mere lab rats in a grand experiment of capitalism. Get full access to The AI & Work Chronicle at ailabor.substack.com/subscribe (https://ailabor.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

3. 

   23 Jun 2026

   Meta retreats on worker surveillance; Gen Z told resistance is futile, yet still pushes back; the promotion ladder losing its middle rung; software engineers do AI's homework nightly, unpaid

   Cognizant trims as India’s IT engine cools India’s Cognizant rolled out an AI program it calls Project Leap. It blends worker re-skilling with job cuts. Indian newspaper Mint reported that up to 4,000 roles could go (https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/30/ai-threat-indias-growth-story-jobs.html). This reaches far past one company. India’s IT and outsourcing sector runs much of the world’s customer support, clerical, and back-office work. When firms there move away from volume hiring toward productivity, the people who answer your support tickets feel it first. Net hiring across India’s top five IT firms already dropped by around 7,000 in the year ending March 2026. The volume model that built India’s white-collar middle class is winding down, and nobody has built the replacement yet. The unpaid homework problem Meanwhile, tech workers around the world are spending nights and weekends teaching themselves AI tools (https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/tech-workers-spending-nights-weekends-110001055.html) because they feel they cannot afford to fall behind. One engineer in Dublin built an AI agent that called US hotels and negotiated room rates for him after work. None of it was part of his job. This is the corporate overhead of the AI shift that does not appear on the ledger. The pressure to keep current moves into personal time. It lands hardest on the people who already worry most about their jobs. The skills race is real, and right now workers are paying for it with their own evenings. The Displacement Audit on Substack has an insightful article (https://substack.com/home/post/p-202256209) that provides an inside look on the stress this is causing IT engineers. Meta backs off its tracking tool Meta scaled back a program that recorded employee keystrokes and clicks to train its AI (https://thenextweb.com/news/meta-applied-ai-unit-revolt-data-labeling-draftees). More than 1,600 workers signed a petition against it. Staff in one office nicknamed it the “Employee Data Extraction Factory.” After the backlash, Meta began letting employees pause the tracking for 30 minutes at a time. The strange part is that the business is thriving even as morale sinks. Meta posted $56.3 billion in first-quarter revenue, up 33 percent. So the surveillance push was a choice made from a position of strength, not desperation, and certainly not cooperation. Middle managers in the crosshairs The career ladder is losing a rung in the middle, too. Bloomberg reported on a widening corporate move to thin out middle management (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-17/why-companies-are-cutting-middle-managers-in-the-ai-era), anchored on a management manifesto from Jack Dorsey. Dorsey wants a company where an AI “intelligence layer” coordinates the work in place of managers, and individual experts decide and act on their own. The same pattern shows up across Block, GitLab, and Citigroup. For service workers, the sting is in what gets cut. The team-lead or shift-manager job was the usual step up from frontline work. That step is exactly the one companies are now pulling. Typical stories have seen the bottom of the ladder dissolved. This a chunk taken from the middle. Quiet resistance on the inside Some workers are pushing back in their own way. Fortune reported that a portion of younger employees refuse to use mandated AI tools (https://fortune.com/2026/04/08/gen-z-workers-sabotage-ai-rollout-backlash/). A few admitted to nudging their performance reviews to make the AI look less effective than it is. Surveys keep finding that workers do not reject AI itself. They reject top-down mandates, unclear rollouts, and tools that add busywork instead of saving time. Force the tools on people without training or trust, and you get resignations and quiet sabotage. The friction is a management problem dressed up as a technology problem. The other side of the ledger Scaler’s India AI Workforce Report, drawn from 11,444 professionals, found that workers who built AI skills saw real pay gains (https://www.scaler.com/blog/india-ai-workforce-report-2026/). Women who moved into AI-enabled roles reported an average salary jump of 145%. One caution here, though. Scaler sells AI training courses, so it has a stake in telling an upbeat story. Read the number as a vendor’s propaganda, not a repeatable phenomenon. Meanwhile, PwC’s 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer, built on more than a billion job ads, found wages growing faster at the most AI-exposed companies (https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/news-room/press-releases/2026/pwc-2026-ai-jobs-barometer.html). It also found a divide. Jobs that AI “professionalizes,” where it handles the routine work so human judgment matters more, are growing twice as fast as jobs it simply makes easier for anyone to do. Get full access to The AI & Work Chronicle at ailabor.substack.com/subscribe (https://ailabor.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

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