Labour Day in the Age of AI Layoffs

Today is International Labour Day.

A day that started as a tribute to workers who fought for basic dignity, fair hours, and safe conditions.

A day that in 2026 carries a particular weight, because a lot of people are heading into the long weekend quietly worried about whether there will still be a job waiting for them when the world catches its next breath.

That worry deserves to be taken seriously, not dismissed with optimistic hand-waving about new opportunities and inevitable progress.

So let’s be honest about what is actually happening, because the full picture is more complicated, and ultimately more hopeful, than most of the current discourse suggests.

The Collective Action Problem Nobody Wants to Name

El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele posted something on X last month that cut through a lot of noise.

That is an unusually clear-eyed observation from a sitting head of government, and it names the structural risk that most corporate communication carefully avoids. Individual companies are making rational decisions. The aggregate result of those decisions is potentially irrational at the system level.

Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported that AI was blamed for 50,000 layoffs in 2025. The tech sector is the most visible example, but the pattern is spreading into marketing, legal support, customer operations, and financial services. Real people are losing real jobs, and the downstream effects on spending, confidence, and community tax bases are real too.

Sam Altman has said publicly that some companies are using AI as a convenient scapegoat for workforce decisions that had more to do with pandemic over-hiring and poor financial management than genuine automation.

There is some truth to that. Corrections have been underway since 2022, and most have not been associated with AI adoption, which really began to affect coding in 2023 and 2024. In other words, the layoffs began for financial reasons.

But that framing is also a convenient deflection. The jobs are still gone. The scapegoat versus genuine cause distinction matters less to the person updating their resume at midnight than it does in a policy debate.

The “Tech Hiring Is Dead” Narrative

Dario Amodei at Anthropic has made statements about AI wiping out white-collar jobs and coding roles within the next few years. He said it plainly, and the comments rippled through the tech community in ways that reinforced a growing narrative: that a career in software development is now a bad bet.

I do not think that holds up against the actual data.

The Indeed AI Tracker reached a high of 4.2% at the end of 2025. Job postings mentioning AI have grown consistently since mid-2023. Employer job postings related to AI jumped 117% between 2024 and 2025.

LinkedIn data tells the same story. AI has already added more than 1.3 million new roles, including AI Engineers, Forward-Deployed Engineers, and Data Annotators. More than 600,000 new AI-enabled data centre jobs have been created.

The US Bureau of Labour Statistics projects computer and information technology occupations to grow at nearly three times the average rate for all jobs through 2034. Professionals with AI expertise earn 56% more on average than peers without it.

This is not a hiring market where tech is dead. It is a hiring market where the skills being rewarded have shifted dramatically, and where people who have not made that shift yet are experiencing real pain.

The distinction matters. “Tech hiring is dead” is a counsel of despair that leads people to exit a field where opportunity is actually growing. “Tech hiring has shifted and requires different skills” is uncomfortable but actionable.

For workers, developing and highlighting relevant AI skills may be the key to landing a job in 2026, particularly in occupations with otherwise muted hiring activity. That is not cheerful messaging. But it is accurate, and accurate is more useful than comfortable.

What the Broader Market Actually Looks Like

The overall picture is one of genuine contradiction, which is why the conversation is so difficult.

Companies are laying off staff, insisting AI will “do more with less,” yet they haven’t found ways to deploy AI at scale. Recruiters say entry-level pathways are narrowing, but critical roles remain hard to fill.

Just over half of people say they’re job hunting in 2026, while nearly 80% feel unprepared to find a new job. That gap between the number of people searching and the number who feel equipped is where a lot of the anxiety is living.

Recent college graduates are bearing a disproportionate share of the disruption. Those aged 22 to 27 saw an unemployment rate of 5.6% at the end of last year, compared to the overall rate of 4.2% (The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 2026). Many of these graduates were headed into entry-level roles at law firms, research organisations, tech companies, and public sector agencies, precisely the environments now adopting AI to handle the tasks that basic training prepared those graduates to perform.

The World Economic Forum estimates that AI could eliminate 92 million jobs by 2030 while creating 170 million new ones, a net gain of 78 million. That number is meaningless to someone who lost their job in accounting in 2025 and cannot afford to retrain for an AI engineering role by 2030. The aggregate optimism and the individual pain are both real at the same time.

Why This Prompted Us to Build Something

At Elephant Stripes, my team and I have been watching this closely. Not from the outside, but as people who care about the practical reality of what workers are navigating right now.

The job seeker’s experience in 2026 is genuinely difficult in a specific way. The advice is abundant. The tools are everywhere. The templates are free and ubiquitous. And yet most people still have resumes that do not actually represent what they are capable of.

The standard AI resume approach makes this worse, not better. You paste your existing resume into a language model, it polishes the language and adds keywords, and you end up with a shinier version of the same document. Generic. Template-heavy. Optimised for an ATS screening tool that has seen ten thousand copies of the same format.

That is why we built JobsLobster differently.

JobsLobster does not just rearrange what you already have. It identifies what is missing. It asks you targeted questions about your actual skills, your specific contributions, and the outcomes you produced. And it builds something stronger from your answers, rather than from the limited version of yourself that ends up in a resume written in haste.

The differentiator is in the input. Most resume tools start with your resume. JobsLobster starts with you.

A Note on What Comes Next

The transition happening right now is real and it is not finished. The disruption to entry-level work is real. The anxiety is legitimate. The companies using AI as convenient cover for decisions they made for other reasons are being less than honest about it.

And the future is not one in which technology simply eliminates work. Deloitte found that while 30% of organisations are exploring agentic AI options and 38% are piloting solutions, only 14% have solutions ready to deploy, and a mere 11% are actively using these systems in production. The wave is coming, but it is not a wall that hit overnight.

The workers who will navigate this best are the ones who are building AI fluency now, not as a panic response to headlines but as a steady, deliberate investment in the skills that the next decade of work will reward.

That is not naive optimism. It is what the data actually says.

Happy Labour Day. The work is changing. So are the people doing it.

---

Are you interested in getting early access to JobsLobster? Drop us a message here to stay updated!