About 1.6 million U.S. workers are being laid off each month this year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS).
* Target revealed plans in late October to eliminate 1,800 corporate jobs, marking its second-largest corporate downsizing effort to date.
* Amazon announced another round of layoffs just before the holidays. The cuts affected 14,000 corporate employees across multiple departments to reduce bureaucracy, “removing layers and shifting resources” to better serve its investments and customers.
* UPS said in a press release that it has cut about 48,000 jobs so far this year,including 34,000 positions through its Network Reconfiguration and Efficiency Reimagined program.
Related: Layoffs commence at two major tech giants
Employees have seemingly come to terms with the economic reality, as voluntary separations have remained steady at 3.1 million.
According to the latest JOLTS report,fewer people are also voluntarily leaving their jobs,especially in blue-collar industries such as food services (-140,000),recreation (-22,000),and arts and entertainment.
Construction was one of the few industries where resignations increased (+56,000), but NPR reports that this probably has something to do with immigration enforcement that has targeted construction workers.
For white-collar workers, AI investments during the Covid pandemic are coming back to claim their jobs years later.
Chegg Sues Google, Cites AI Impact on Revenue and Stock Price
In February, according to court records, Chegg sued Google in district court, claiming that artificial intelligence results from Gemini have hurt its revenue and traffic.
As Business Wire reported, Chegg said Google forces it and other companies to “supply…proprietary content in order to be included in Google’s search function.”
The company also said Google unfairly exercises “monopoly power within search and other anti-competitive conduct to muscle out companies like Chegg… reaping the financial benefits of Chegg’s content without having to spend a dime.”
Chegg reported second-quarter revenue of $105.1 million, a year-over-year decline of more than a third.
Chegg shares peaked in early February 2021 at $113; it closed trading on Nov. 7 at about 92 cents per share.The stock is down nearly 35% month to date.
While AI competition is costing nearly half of Chegg employees their jobs, AI is also having a more direct impact on the job market.
Accenture recently announced