Grateful for Your Contributions

What AI-justified mass layoffs reveal about what we were never actually owed

Four thousand people learned they no longer had a job at Block in a single week. Jack Dorsey, who founded the company and serves as its CEO, was refreshingly candid about why. Artificial intelligence, he said, can now do what those people were doing. The stock jumped twenty-four percent. Investors called it a great day.

January 2026 produced 108,435 layoff notices in the United States alone. Amazon cut 30,000 positions in three months. eBay released 800 people on the same day Block made its announcement. Pinterest trimmed around fifteen percent of its workforce. Each announcement came wrapped in the same language: the company is evolving, the industry is shifting, the future is bright. The people who no longer work there are, the press releases inevitably noted, incredibly talented, and the company is grateful for everything they contributed.

Grateful. That word keeps appearing. I want to sit with it for a moment.

The Language We Chose

There is a phrase that has become so common in corporate layoff announcements that it has developed its own satirical genre online: "We are grateful for their contributions." It appears in almost every statement, alongside assurances about severance packages, career transition resources, and the company's enduring commitment to its mission. The language is designed to signal humanity. It signals the opposite.

In his landmark study of social institutions, Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam traced the slow dissolution of communal bonds in American life through the second half of the twentieth century. He was writing about bowling leagues and parent-teacher associations, but his underlying observation applies here with uncomfortable precision. When the formal structures that once held people together collapse, the language of connection does not disappear immediately. It lingers, hollowed out, doing the work of community without any of the substance.

Corporate gratitude language is that hollowed shell. It invokes the emotional vocabulary of relationship at the precise moment the relationship is being severed. "We are grateful" is what you say to someone who did something for you freely, out of care or generosity. You are not grateful to someone you paid a salary to meet specific deliverables. You owe them their wages and, if you are decent, their dignity. Gratitude is a different register entirely, and reaching for it when handing someone a termination notice is not kindness. It is a kind of theater.

The AI Question Beneath the AI Question

Forrester Research has raised an uncomfortable possibility about this wave of AI-driven layoffs. The productivity gains that companies cite when they announce workforce reductions may not be fully attributable to artificial intelligence at all. The automation narrative, Forrester suggests, may be serving partly as financial cover, a story that is easier to tell than "we over-hired during a period of zero-interest-rate exuberance and are now correcting."

This does not mean AI is not genuinely transforming work. It clearly is. But the speed and scale of these announcements, and the near-uniformity of the justification, warrants scrutiny. When every major tech company reaches for the same explanation simultaneously, the explanation may be less about any single company's operational reality and more about an industry-wide narrative that happens to be available, that happens to satisfy investors, and that happens to carry a veneer of inevitability.

The philosopher John Rawls argued in A Theory of Justice that a just institution is one structured so that its basic terms could be agreed to by rational people who did not yet know what position they would occupy within it. Applied to this moment: would anyone who did not yet know whether they would be on the executive team or on the list of 4,000 agree that "AI made us do it" is an adequate explanation, let alone an adequate severance?

Rawls was describing the conditions under which we could call something just. Most of these announcements do not come close to passing that test. The people being let go did not participate in the decision to adopt AI tools. They did not set the hiring targets that led to the over-hiring. They had no seat at the table where the stock price and the workforce reduction were weighed against each other. They are presented with a fait accompli and told to feel grateful that the company is being transparent about the reason.

We Have Been Here Before

I wrote earlier in Code and Conduct about the dangerous habit of framing the workplace as a family. The piece argued that when companies recruit with language about "joining a family," they are constructing a psychological architecture that benefits the employer far more than the employee. The family framing demands loyalty without offering its protections. It asks workers to think of their jobs the way they might think of their parents or siblings: not as relationships entered into by mutual choice and sustained by mutual benefit, but as something prior to choice, something owed.

The layoff announcement is where that framing collapses most visibly and most painfully. Families do not conduct reduction-in-force events. Families do not achieve a twenty-four percent stock rally by removing members. When a company that spent years telling its employees they were part of something deeper and more meaningful than a transactional employment relationship turns around and cites quarterly optimization as the reason for their departure, the dissonance is not incidental. It is the point. The family language was never meant to protect the employee. It was meant to secure their loyalty at a discount.

What Dorsey did at Block is, in one sense, more honest than that. He did not bury the reason in euphemism. He said directly: AI can do this work. He did not pretend the relationship was a family. He named the transaction. And yet, even this honesty carries its own distortion, because naming the reason does not make the process just, and transparency about a decision is not the same as legitimacy in how it was made.

What We Owe Each Other

There is a concept in the Talmud, tractate Bava Metzia, about the obligation of an employer to pay workers promptly. The rabbis treated the withholding of wages not as a financial infraction but as a moral one, because the worker has already given their labor, already committed their time and effort, and to withhold what is owed them is to take something that belongs to them. The principle extends beyond money. It includes dignity, transparency, and fair dealing.

The mass layoff, justified by AI efficiency, is in tension with that older obligation. Not because AI adoption is inherently wrong, and not because companies are never entitled to restructure. They are. But the scale and speed of these decisions, the way they are packaged in gratitude language while workers are given days to clear their desks, suggests that the moral accounting is happening only on one side of the ledger. The gains from AI adoption accrue primarily to shareholders. The costs are distributed almost entirely to the workers whose labor trained the systems, maintained the infrastructure, and carried the company through its years of growth.

Sherry Turkle, in Alone Together, wrote about how technology mediates our relationships in ways that reduce them, how what looks like connection can be a sophisticated form of disconnection. The AI layoff announcement achieves something similar at scale. It presents the appearance of a reasoned, even progressive explanation for a human rupture. It invokes the future, innovation, and necessity. What it rarely invokes is the person on the other end of the letter.

The Question That Remains

Forrester's skepticism about whether the AI productivity gains are real or are serving as financial narrative raises a question worth sitting with as these announcements continue to accumulate. If the AI revolution in labor productivity is genuinely as transformative as these companies claim, where are the investments in worker transition? Where are the apprenticeship programs, the retraining partnerships, the extended bridges to new roles? If a company genuinely believes it is reshaping its industry rather than simply reducing costs, that belief would show up in how it treats the people it is asking to bear the burden of the reshaping.

That investment is rarely visible in these announcements. The transition resources offered are typically modest, the timelines short, and the career development language generic. This is not what it looks like when a company believes it is doing something historic and necessary. It is what it looks like when a company is managing a cost line.

Four thousand people at Block. Thirty thousand at Amazon over three months. The stock prices moved accordingly. The gratitude was expressed. The press releases were carefully worded and widely distributed.

What if we held the companies to the standard of their own language? If you are genuinely grateful, what does gratitude require of you beyond a well-crafted paragraph? That question, I suspect, is the one most of these organizations would prefer not to answer.