CEOs order mass firings across capitalist economy, blame AI

April 26 — Late April has been corporate profit reporting season for the first quarter of 2026 starting as usual with some of the biggest banks. Many ruling-class analysts publicly worried that the quarter’s paroxysm of warfare in the Persian Gulf, spiraling global inflation and shutdown of oil-dependent supply chains would lead to negative profit results. 

Speaking to Wall Street investors with the New York Times listening in, Bank of America’s (BoA) chief executive Brian T. Moynihan allayed Wall Street’s worries, reporting $8.6 billion in profit for the quarter, up $1.6 billion from the first quarter last year. (New York Times, April 21) 

How did Moynihan explain the fact that the nation’s second largest bank, with over $2.5 trillion in assets, made such eye-popping profit? Did the bank issue more loans for commercial properties or small businesses? Sell more mortgages? Make winning deals or investments or buy some other bank? No. In fact all those usual measures were down for the period.

Moynihan sounded like a scientist, saying he made such gains by “eliminating work and applying technology.” Specifically, he explained he ordered the elimination of over 1,000 jobs at BoA — firing hundreds of relatively well-paid front and back office workers. He repeatedly claimed to have replaced humans by employing artificial intelligence (AI) technology in work areas as varied as filling out regulatory paperwork, customer service, economic analysis and investment management. Moynihan promised more cuts to payroll were coming. 

For a moment the bankers’ banker could have been a NASA spokesperson describing the recent moonshot. “AI gives us places to go we haven’t gone,” Moynihan waxed poetic.

In all, BoA, JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo declared $47 billion in collective profits, up 18% from first quarter 2025 while terminating 15,000 employees during the opening three months of 2026. The mass terminations made little news while the world was focused on the genocidal U.S.-Israeli bombing of Iranian, Lebanese and Palestinian schools, hospitals, railroads and homes.

Fire away!

While the Pentagon was positioned to blow up by some estimates nearly $100 billion in missiles and bombs in the Trump administration’s attempt to regain control of Iran’s oil, the word went out on Wall Street to also “fire away!”  On Feb. 26, one of the richest men in the world announced the firing of nearly half of his company’s 10,000 workers. Billionaire Jack Dorsey, a founder of Twitter, announced the termination of over 4,000 high-paid, high-tech workers at Block, Inc., which runs the financial payment systems of Square, CashApp and Tidal. 

Dorsey called on his fellow capitalists to “act decisively” in using AI to replace workers. Turns out, this was just an opening shot. The February Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report showed over 100,000 job losses that month — initiated by orders from the bankers. (workers.org/2026/03/91416)

Manufacturers with debt to Wall Street swiftly followed bankers’ orders. Nike issued the corporate death penalty to over 2,500 workers during the first quarter in two rounds of terminations, largely in its own technology departments. Nike’s COO Venkatesh Alagirisamy called using AI technology to increase worker productivity and offset years of slumping global sales of high-end sneakers his “Win Now” strategy. (cnbc.com, April 23)

On April 23, another CNBC headline spelled out the plans of billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp social media monopoly: “Meta will cut 10% of workforce as company pushes deeper into AI.” Gone in just the first three months of 2026 are 14,000 Meta workers as well as the short-lived public relations deception that AI under capitalist control would somehow lead to better working conditions. 

In January, Amazon announced plans to fire about 16,000 corporate office workers, its second round of mass job cuts since last October. Following up on multiple rounds of layoffs in 2025, tech behemoth Microsoft announced on April 23 that it will “offer buyouts” — corporate speak for “quit now with some chump change before you’re fired with nothing” — to over 9,000 of its 125,000 U.S. workers. (Boston Globe, April 23)

In March, Oracle initiated massive job cuts to affect up to 30,000 positions globally. Dell slashed its workforce by 11,000 in January. Salesforce fired nearly 1,000. Pinterest jettisoned 15% of its workers while Autodesk kicked roughly 1,000 out the door. Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Capital One and BlackRock ordered thousands more to clear out their desks, while at UPS, Target, Dow and Home Depot over 40,000 mostly office workers were “let go,” as they like to put it so politely.

Many Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) notices were filed with the U.S. Department of Labor from nearly every sector of the U.S. economy — with the noticeable exception of corporations primarily in the business of manufacturing weapons of mass destruction — warning of many more job losses to come. (intellizence.com, April 21) Clearwater Paper in Arkansas plans to lay off 20% of its workers; Walt Disney, 1,000 terminations; General Motors announced 1,300 layoffs; Ikea, 800; the list of first quarter “warnings” goes on and on at intellizence.com. The 1988 WARN Act requires that employers with 100 or more workers give at least 60 days notice of workplace closures or mass layoffs.

High Tech, Low Pay

Is AI the sole or even the primary cause of this current surge of layoffs and job cuts? And to what degree is it even possible to continue to produce profit on paper by the elimination of labor through utilizing AI for production? This is being debated among capitalists and anti-capitalists alike. Many workers inside these corporations are arguing on public chats that “AI” is simply the bosses’ current excuse for speeding up work for those left in the cubicles and on the shop floors. 

What can no longer be misunderstood is that capitalists have now gone the whole-hog in claiming that AI is causing them to eliminate jobs in a massive and rapid way. 

BoA and nearly every other player in finance capital have pumped hundreds of billions (by some estimates trillions) of dollars into “round-tripping” or “circular” AI deals — the largest capitalist investments in world history. These massive data centers, global cloud services and chip manufacturing consume vast amounts of energy, while pliant politicians are bought off. But in essence, the capitalists are doing the same thing that capitalists have done since investing in mechanical looms and cotton gins in the early 19th century and primitive robotics in the 1980s — “eliminating work and applying technology,” as BoA’s CEO explained last week. 

On April 23, Tufts University published what the Boston Globe called a “startling study” predicting that in the next five years, AI will be responsible for the elimination of 207,000 Boston-area jobs, with 260,000 more gone statewide and 9.3 million fewer jobs countrywide. 

In his groundbreaking book “High Tech, Low Pay” (1986), Sam Marcy — a founding leader of Workers World Party and chairperson until his death in 1998 — pointed out that this process of investment in technology to decrease the amount of labor needed while increasing profits is as old as capitalism itself. The capitalist is motivated to increase competitiveness and outsell and buy up rivals. But the high-tech revolution epitomized by computerization and robotization of manufacturing and so-called “information technology” in the 1970s and 1980s rapidly accelerated this process. 

In addition, as Marcy explained, the high-tech revolution produces a change in the character of the working class within a more service-oriented economy, with Black, Latine, Asian, Indigenous, women and gender-oppressed, immigrant, LGBTQIA2S+ and disabled workers making up the vast majority. 

However, as Marcy emphasized in Chapter 2, “Capitalism never fully carries through any of its economic tendencies to the very end” due to the contradictions inherent in its labor-eliminating tactics. Time and time again in capitalism’s historical development, the introduction of technology to increase productivity leads to overproduction, i.e., the inability of the workers to buy back what they produce due to the wage-lowering and job-killing effects of the very newly implemented labor-saving technology. Economic crises of recession, depression and now stagflation (high inflation with economic contraction) inevitably result. 

This provokes resistance from the workers!

How the workers respond is key 

One thing that is new with the developing invention and introduction of AI — besides the previously-unimaginable swiftness from implementation to mass job cuts currently affecting largely highly paid “white collar” and majority white workers — is the openness of the capitalists about what they are doing. This openness is encouraged by the political turn toward fascism of the MAGA governing section of the U.S. ruling class. 

Moynihan’s headline-grabbing pronouncement last week that he had ordered mass firings simply because AI made it possible, and that he is planning many more, was prepared by the year-long shock-and-awe program and propaganda of the billionaire cabal at the White House. This time last year Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) fired over 300,000 federal workers while busting their union contracts — all without any job actions or strikes thus far from the affected unions. Nor has the bureaucracy of the AFL-CIO, currently hog-tied politically and financially to the Democratic Party, launched any real fight back around these massive job cuts.

With growing calls from a new generation of leaders from labor’s rank and file for a general strike — picked up and amplified by growing ranks of socialist and communist-minded young workers who matured during the global Black Lives Matter, Free Palestine and now Abolish ICE and antiwar movements — the call to make May Day 2026 a day of “no work, no school, no shopping” is right on time for combatting the bankers’ orders. 

Only the collective, organized power of the workers and the oppressed to withhold their labor can stop the capitalists’ AI dreams of worker-free profits. May Day’s embryonic vision of a general strike has many capitalist enterprises to target going forward. Strikes and other militant, concerted actions must be aimed at ending the capitalists’ regime of imperialist war and forced unemployment forever and for all.

Gillis is a 37-year Boston school bus driver and former elected president of the drivers’ union, United Steelworkers Local 8751, now retired.