With the baseball season officially in the rearview mirror after the end of the World Series, and Americans fully settled into the fall weather, many are turning their attention to the winter holidays.
Thanksgiving is just a few weeks away and Christmas will come right after, so for many of us November can be a little hectic.
-
Walmart: 1.6 million employees
-
Amazon: 1.1 million employees
-
UNIVERSAL POSTAL UNION: 443,000 employees
-
Aim: 427,346 employees
-
Housing deposit: 418,000 employees
Source: Ringover
However, for tens of thousands of workers, this season will not be a joyous one, as the wave of layoffs that has swallowed American employees all year is increasing in the fourth quarter.
Amazon, UPS and Target, three of the country’s largest employers, have already announced plans to lay off tens of thousands of workers in the coming weeks.
-
Aim revealed plans in late October to cut 1,800 corporate jobs, marking the second-largest corporate workforce reduction in its history.
-
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 their investments and customers.
-
Universal Postal Union has cut about 48,000 jobs so far this year, including 34,000 positions through its Network Reconfiguration and Efficiency Reimagined program.
Although many other layoffs have been confirmed, especially in the tech industry, it sometimes takes weeks or even months before they take effect.
On Monday, November 3, 2025, a couple of big tech companies began laying off thousands of employees.
Salesforce is about to nearly cut its customer service workforce in half from 9,000 employees to 5,000.Image source: Lam/Stringer via Getty Images
On Monday, AI-based customer relationship management platform Salesforce and cloud applications platform Oracle Corp. began the next round of ongoing layoffs.
Oracle has already laid off thousands of employees as part of its $1.6 billion restructuring plan. However, the company said it had only spent $451 million of that amount as of August 31, meaning another $10,000 could still be on the chopping block.
Related: White-collar workers should be concerned about this worrying trend
Oracle is expected to lay off up to 260 employees in Washington state on Nov. 3, according to WARNTracker.com. The tracker covers the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification program, which requires companies with 100 or more employees to provide at least 60 days’ written notice of a plant closing or mass layoff affecting 50 or more workers.
Salesforce also issued a WARNING notice for Nov. 3 that it will also lay off between 51 and 100 employees in the state as part of its plan to cut between 2,501 and 5,000 more jobs.
In September, the company confirmed that it will reduce its customer service team from 9,000 employees to 5,000. As Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said, the company made the decision because “I need fewer heads…” due to the “benefits and efficiencies” of its new AI model.
This is a trend that American white-collar workers will continue to face in the future.
Amazon, Target, Salesforce and Oracle are not alone when it comes to reducing their workforce before the holidays.
GM is cutting hundreds of jobs at its Georgia IT center. And Molson Coors eliminated 400 salaried jobs in its Americas business, representing about 9% of its administrative workforce.
Related: Ubisoft ‘soft layoffs’ expected after latest announcement
Companies, especially in the technology sector, see the AI ​​revolution as a way to reduce layoffs in their management ranks.
Some even say they believe they will do better with smaller organizations. Meta sent a memo last week in which the company’s AI chief said that by reducing the size of its team, fewer conversations will be needed to make decisions and that each person “will have more burden and will have more reach,” Chip Cutter, a Wall Street Journal jobs reporter, recently said in a podcast.
According to technology market intelligence firm UnearthInsight, up to 500,000 white-collar software workers could be laid off in the next two to three years, and about 70% of those layoffs would affect workers with between four and 12 years of experience.
But some critics say these companies are simply blaming AI for job cuts, when the real problem was overhiring during the pandemic.
“I’m really skeptical about whether the layoffs we’re seeing currently are really due to true efficiency gains. It’s more of a projection toward AI in the sense of ‘We can use AI to make good excuses,'” Fabian Stephany, an assistant professor of AI working at the Oxford Internet Institute, told CNBC.
“To some extent, it’s firing people for whom there was no sustainable long-term outlook, and instead of saying ‘we miscalculated this two or three years ago,’ they can now resort to scapegoating, which is, ‘it’s because of the AI, though.'”
Related: Veteran Analyst Says Meta Stock Stuck in ‘Short-Term Purgatory’
This story was originally reported by TheStreet on November 3, 2025, where it first appeared in the Employment section. Add TheStreet as a preferred source by clicking here.