by KEVIN REED
Another devastating round of job cuts has just opened in the tech industry with the layoffs announced by Block and eBay, one in which corporate executives are openly and explicitly justifying mass sackings as the product of artificial intelligence and “new ways of working.”
On February 27, Block, formerly the financial services company Square, announced that it is eliminating more than 4,000 jobs—nearly 40 percent of its workforce—and cutting headcount from over 10,000 to just under 6,000.
Block CEO Jack Dorsey made a point of tying the destruction of jobs directly to AI, bragging that “the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company.”
Dorsey insisted that this was not a response to crisis, but a strategic “structural change,” writing to shareholders that Block is “ahead of the curve” and that “within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes.”
The company expects hundreds of millions of dollars in restructuring charges in the first quarter alone, with most of the layoffs completed by mid?year, meanwhile its stock price surged on the news and Wall Street celebrated the enormous cut to labor costs.
Almost simultaneously, eBay announced that it will cut approximately 800 positions, around 6 percent of its global workforce, in yet another restructuring aimed at “realigning” staffing with “long?term strategic priorities.”
This is the third round of job cuts since 2023 at the massive global online marketplace, coming just days after its $1.2 billion agreement to acquire Gen?Z–focused resale platform Depop, as part of a multi?year effort to “consistently” reduce headcount while ramping up AI investments across its marketplace and internal operations.
Local reports are saying that managers, researchers, data scientists and software engineers are being hit heavily and that the restructuring is directed squarely at the core technical and professional layers whose work is being increasingly automated or offshored.
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