There have been recent reports of large job cuts across the country.
E-commerce and technology giant Amazon, for example, is eliminating
16,000 corporate jobs, partly to reduce its organizational structure —
but also because it expects “efficiency gains” as artificial
intelligence is used more extensively across the company.
Almost at the same time, United Parcel Service said it will eliminate
30,000 delivery jobs — in part because it is getting less business from
Amazon.
Those are big employment reductions. and it’s a tough job market out
there. The Washington Post reported that 2025 was the second-worst year
for job creation since the Great Recession in 2008-09. Bureau of Labor
Statistics data says long-term unemployment in the country, defined as
someone looking for work but unable to find it for at least six months,
is at a four-year high.
Fear not, says Douglas Holtz-Eakin, writer of The Daily Dish, an
economics-based email. Holtz-Eakin, whose background includes work for
President George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain, reminded his readers in a
perceptive note titled “The Robots Are Coming” that if the American job
market is stumbling today, our long history shows it always rebounds.
“Amazon is cutting 30,000 jobs, at least in part because of the promise
of AI,” he wrote. “Sounds like a lot. But in December 2025, there were
164 million people employed in the United States.”
Looking at it that way, Amazon’s cuts amount to 0.02% of working
Americans. That’s a very tiny number.
“On the other hand, 30,000 is close to 10 percent of Amazon employment,”
he added. “So, if every firm is ultimately going to have its ‘Amazon
Moment,’ then 16.4 million jobs are facing robo-elimination and the
unemployment rate will jump from 4.4 percent to 14.4%.”
That sounds awfully bad, and in an absolute worst-case economic crash,
let’s concede that 14% unemployment can’t be ruled out. Again,
Holtz-Eakin looks at the big picture of the job market to put today’s
situation in perspective.
In November 2025, he wrote, the United States had 5 million “job
separations.” This included jobs that were eliminated, but more
importantly it included people who left their job for any reason, such
as resignation or firing.
He did the math. Those 16.4 million jobs that conceivably face
“robo-elimination” amount to only three or four months of the country’s
typical job separations.
The point is that, while the Amazon and UPS announcements involve a lot
of workers, the American job market is constantly changing and evolving.
There are other jobs out there for the Amazon corporate staffers and the
UPS drivers. It may take more time than usual to find one, but those
workers won’t be unemployed forever.
“In the same way that jobs are regularly destroyed, new jobs are
regularly created,” Holtz-Eakin concluded. In fact, the Bureau of Labor
Statistics put out an interesting report last August about the 20
occupations with the highest estimated percentage change of employment
over the next decade. Twelve of them are related to medical care. Others
involve alternative energy, technology and finance.
The beauty of the American job market is that the creative and
destructive actions tend to remain balanced over the long term. The
public needs to keep that in mind as the nation works through a
difficult period. Brighter days always lie ahead — the BLS expects the
economy to add 5.2 million new jobs by 2034 — and there is no reason to
think that’s untrue today.
Jack Ryan, Enterprise-Journal
