Layoffs at Block add to growing backlash bubbling up across American companies; ‘It brings out the pitchforks’
It was the doomsday scenario many white-collar workers had feared: an S&P 500 company cutting nearly half of its staff. The reason? AI.
The blowback was quick and severe.
After Block CEO Jack Dorsey announced that his financial-technology firm was laying off 4,000 people, text threads between workers outside Block erupted, while executives began furiously dissecting the move. And then, they went public.
“Square is just the beginning,” former Meta and Salesforce executive Clara Shih warned on X.
“A lot of the jobs that we’ve thrown human beings at the last 20 or 30 years, you won’t need as many human beings doing those same jobs,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a television interview Friday, while noting new roles will also be created.
“Everyone will point the finger at everyone else,” investor Brian Norgard predicted.
Some saw Block’s move as evidence of the company’s mismanagement and overhiring. Plenty raised concerns that other executives might now follow suit and more aggressively lay off their own employees.
Even if some considered AI a convenient excuse for the layoffs, the downsizing sparked outrage among technology workers. Many viewed the move as the clearest sign yet that companies would be far smaller in the future—and that employees would bear the pain.
“When things crystallize like this, it brings out the pitchforks and the torches,” said Marc Cenedella, CEO of the jobs platform Ladders. “People are angry at the destabilizing impact that AI is inevitably going to have on our economy and our work life.”
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