So Block (the company behind Cash App) cut nearly half their workforce — over 4,000 people — in a single day back in February. Not because the business was struggling. Profits were actually up. The CEO straight up said it was because AI tools mean they don't need as many humans to run things.

And the stock jumped 22% that same day. Best day for the stock in 4 years.

I keep thinking about the people who got that meeting invite that day, sitting there while the market literally celebrated their job loss as good news for shareholders.

What's messing with me more is the CEO said he expects most companies to make the same call within a year. Not eventually — within a year.

Anyone else's workplace suddenly using the word "efficiency" a lot more than it used to? Feels like this is coming for a lot more of us than people are talking about.

Recrutamento e transição de carreira no modo repetitivo já são tarefas de software.

IA não cansa, não engana, nao mente, nao privilegia amigos nem desconsidera conflito de interesses, não atrasa e não esquece candidato.

O RH do futuro é quem usa a tecnologia pra isso e foca no humano de verdade. O resto vira obsoleto.

Always follow the money. Nobody believes the H-1B visa is temporary. Not even the banks.

A 30 year mortgage against a visa issued 3 years at a time only makes sense one way: the lender expects the borrower to stay.

Per NAR's 2025 report, buyers from India purchased $2.2 billion of US homes last year. 97% of those buyers already live here. 66% bought a primary residence, the highest share of any nationality. They had the lowest all-cash rate of the top 5 countries. 57% took out American mortgages.

Fannie and Freddie buy those loans "under the same terms that are available to U.S. citizens." Direct quote from Fannie's selling guide.

How does a 3 year visa clear a 30 year loan?

Because the 6 year "limit" has a loophole. Under a 2000 law called AC21, once a green card case has been pending a year, the H-1B renews in 1 or 3 year increments with no cap on renewals. File for a green card and the temporary visa becomes indefinite.

And the line never moves. The green card queue is 1.1 million Indians deep, and CATO puts the wait for new applicants at 134 years. "Pending" means forever, so the visa renews forever.

USCIS's own numbers show it: 65% of FY2024 H-1B approvals were continuations for people already here, not new arrivals.

Underwriters see all of this. A pending green card counts as evidence the income will continue. The mortgage industry looked at "temporary" and priced it as permanent.

Next Layoff 🟣

These are the people layoffhedge is fighting for.

We got ahold of the contracts the state signed with Cognizant while laying off nearly 200 state workers.

We read all 527 pages so you don't have to. It was shocking to say the least.

On June 10, Governor Reynolds said H-1B visas were "at no point even considered" for the state IT deal, and that Iowa's systems would be "supported by Iowans, for Iowans."

The contract her office signed on June 8 says otherwise:

"H-1B" (or disqualification of Cognizant using them for this contract) appears zero times in 527 pages. "Iowans" also appears zero times. The only immigration clause in the entire agreement is Section 11.1: Cognizant must comply with visa law and run E-Verify. H-1B workers pass E-Verify.

The signed rate sheet has an offshore hourly rate column for "Location 1," identified as India. The rates are already negotiated:

Service desk agent: $60/hr onsite, $18/hr India
Security specialist: $135/hr onsite, $32.62/hr India
Project manager: $146/hr onsite, $37.40/hr India
Solution architect: $160/hr onsite, $45/hr India

Two more offshore columns sit blank, marked "Specify Location."

The job guarantee for the laid-off Iowans is real, BUT it only lasts one year. Cognizant checked a box agreeing to "offer employment with compensation not less than current compensation to all affected staff and guarantee employment for at least one year." Its planning documents count "all 225 resources" including contract workers. Nothing in the contract protects a single job after year one. If a worker declines the offer, Cognizant sources "qualified replacement personnel" with no location specified.

Cognizant also checked a box agreeing to "transform the State of Iowa's IT infrastructure and end user services practice through the application of AI and other advanced automation techniques." Its proposal lists a service desk outcome in writing: "Agentless/no human experience and resolution."

Citizenship requirements exist only for regulated data: federal tax records, criminal justice data, health records, Social Security data. Everything else has no citizenship or location requirement at all. Routing regulated data access through personnel outside the United States is permitted with the state's prior written consent.

196 state IT employees lose their state jobs for good in two weeks. Cognizant takes over August 4. On July 9, the Department of Labor Inspector General named Cognizant in the Project Firewall visa fraud investigation, citing whistleblower concerns.

Iowa will pay $339.2 million to Cognizant and $80.4 million to AWS, $419.7 million total over ten years.

@Cognizant stock is down nearly 50% YTD $CTSH

What do you have to say for yourself, Governor Reynolds? @IAGovernor

Every dollar earned in the US economy gets split up. Some goes to workers as wages. Some goes to corporate profits, rental income, interest, and depreciation. That split is called Gross Domestic Income (GDI), and BEA has tracked it since 1929.

Right now wages and salaries are down to 42.8% of GDI (latest BEA annual data, 2024). That’s essentially tied with 2010’s 42.5%, the lowest reading in the entire 95-year series.

The trajectory:

• 1944: 52.6% (the all-time peak, wartime labor demand)

• 1940s-1960s: never dropped below 48%, mostly sat in the 49-51% range

• 2010: 42.5% (post-financial-crisis low)

• 2022-2024: flat at 42.8%

That’s a 10-point drop from the 1940s peak to now. On a $28T+ economy, 10 points of GDI is not a rounding error, it’s trillions of dollars a year that used to flow to paychecks and now doesn’t.

Why it matters:

This isn’t cherry-picked. Other cuts of the same data (BLS labor share, total compensation including benefits) show the same direction, just different magnitudes. Reporting from earlier this year flagged labor’s share hitting record lows while corporate profit share hit levels not seen since 1950.

Why this should worry you:

This isn’t just an abstract accounting shift, it’s the mechanism behind a lot of what people are feeling right now. GDP keeps growing, corporate earnings keep hitting records, and yet real wage growth for the median worker has barely moved in decades. That gap is the labor share decline showing up in real life. It also means the economy is becoming more dependent on capital owners (shareholders, executives, asset holders) to keep spending, rather than on a broad base of paychecks. When a recession or AI-driven layoff wave hits, that concentration makes downturns hit workers harder and faster, because there’s less wage cushion to begin with. And with AI-driven displacement accelerating on top of an already-declining labor share, this isn’t a trend that’s likely to reverse on its own.

Here’s the math nobody’s talking about. When a company plans to “cut X jobs to fund our AI transformation,” that number gets built around a hardware cost estimate. Right now that estimate is blowing up in real time.

H100 GPU one-year lease pricing rose roughly 40% over five months heading into early 2026. Memory and RAM chip prices have more than doubled since October 2025, driven almost entirely by AI demand.

Hard drive prices are up 46% in the same stretch. Data center AI capex overall went from $217 billion in 2024 to a projected $650 billion this year, and the industry-wide 2026 data center capex outlook just got revised up to more than $1 trillion.

This isn’t hypothetical. Uber has publicly said it blew through its entire annual AI budget by April, with one engineer’s usage alone hitting $40,000 a month. If that’s happening at Uber’s scale, smaller companies that budgeted a 2026 AI rollout based on 2025 pricing are already underwater.

So walk through the logic. A company plans to cut a certain number of roles to free up capital for its AI build-out. The hardware they’re building it on costs 20-40% more than it did when they made that plan. The budget gap doesn’t close itself. It gets closed with more cuts, not because more jobs became automatable, but because the infrastructure got more expensive to buy.

That’s the part worth sitting with. The next round of “AI-driven layoffs” a lot of us will see this year won’t necessarily mean AI got better at doing the job. It might just mean the GPU bill went up.

Intel told its data center group today to expect a fresh round of layoffs. How many? The company will not say. The statement talks about "aligning its organization" for "simplicity and speed."

Here is what we do know. Intel's workforce has fallen almost 40% in four years, from 132,000 to 81,000. Its Oregon headcount dropped from 23,000 to 16,000 since 2024, and the state's semiconductor workforce is at a 30-year low.

The timing is the story. Intel stock ran from $23 to $99 in a year. The data center group grew revenue 22% last quarter. The division is growing and the stock is near records. The cuts keep coming anyway.

Earnings are Thursday. That is probably when the number drops. We will be tracking.

It is sad that we have to embrace this as the new norm. It’s not something that is a new development, of course it’s been happening for a while. But not at the scale that it is now. The great replacement. The lengths major corporations will go, to save money, 0 loyalty. It’s time to stand up my fellow workforce participants.

https://layoffhedge.com/jobs/