Thanks to AI, white-collar workers are discovering what blue-collar workers learned a half-century ago: they’re disposable.
Last week, MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes took to X to announce that America’s white-collar workers were the latest victims of a newly waged class war captained by tech billionaires. The goal, he wrote, was “to do to white-collar workers what globalization and neoliberalism did to blue-collar workers.”
That thread went viral because the narrative is seductive. The stories about mass layoffs at tech firms, coupled with Donald Trump and the New Right’s attacks against “credentialed elites,” feel like evidence of something both seismic and systemic. But the idea that tech billionaires and elites are engaged in a full-scale campaign specifically against white-collar workers misses a deeper, more uncomfortable truth: What we’re witnessing isn’t some coordinated political vendetta against the laptop class. It’s just capitalism working exactly as intended.
Certainly, the recent jobs data is sobering. According to the latest ADP Employment Report, white-collar job growth has not just slowed; it has entered a period of contraction. Though private employers added a measly 22,000 jobs in January 2026, the professional services sector hemorrhaged 57,000 positions. Last month, US employers announced over 108,000 job cuts, the highest start-of-year total since the 2009 Great Recession, with layoffs rising 118 percent year over year and over 200 percent from the end of 2025. Many of those cuts were in white-collar professions, and the usual suspects in Big Tech are leading the charge: Amazon has implemented multiple rounds of cuts, eliminating around 16,000 corporate jobs in January as part of a broader goal to trim some 30,000 white-collar roles. Meta continued layoffs in its Reality Labs division and other teams, with hundreds of positions already cut in early 2026.
The temptation is to read this job-cutting bloodbath through the lens of the MAGA-versus-libs culture war. It’s true that at the beginning of Trump’s second term, he began with a sword drawn against liberal strongholds: universities, federal agencies, and NGOs. The architects of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) mounted a multipronged assault on civil servants, scientists, and universities through funding cuts and layoffs. On his White House vengeance tour, Trump seemed especially happy to target college-educated white-collar workers because they were the segment of the population least likely to support him.
But while troubling, these were targeted but relatively limited attacks at academia, civil servants, and bureaucrats, not a nationwide class war specifically targeting white-collar workers. The truth is: the tech billionaires don’t hate the professional-managerial class in the way MAGA does; they just found a cheaper way to replace a large portion of it, while house-breaking the survivors in the process. It’s a story about AI or, at the very least, about corporate exuberance around the overhyped promise of AI.
By the end of 2025, AI had been cited as a contributing factor in nearly 55,000 domestic layoffs, according to figures from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, with major firms increasingly citing automation as a rationale for cutting staff. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said the company shed four thousand customer support workers once AI tools absorbed about half of the workload, translating technical capacity directly into payroll cuts.
If corporations can utilize AI to finally reach a level of “good enough” to draft code, write reports, moderate content, and optimize logistics, that means it’s coming after any job involving tasks that used to require, say, a $120,000-a-year credentialed professional. Reducing head count in middle management, programming, or communication is simply the latest iteration of the calculus that drove factories to adopt conveyor belts or robots to reduce head count. Using technology to wring the same productivity from fewer workers is not a betrayal of capitalism’s promise; it is the promise, and it’s been so for hundreds of years. As Karl Marx observed in Capital, machinery and automation is deployed not to lighten work but to deepen capital’s grip on labor. “The constant aim of these improvements is to diminish the manual labor for a given capital, which, thanks to these improvements, not only requires fewer laborers, but also constantly substitutes the less skilled for the more skilled,” he wrote.
The problem with this specific tech-vs-white-collar-professionals “class war” narrative is that it personifies a system that has no central strategy or unified plan beyond extracting value. For the average white-collar worker — the person who isn’t a high-level policy writer but a spreadsheet-jockey or a midlevel content strategist — the threat isn’t coming from a Trumpian decree. It’s coming from the quarterly earnings report. This is why even firms that once marketed themselves as progressive, mission-driven, and “human-centric” suddenly trim teams as their shareholders demand bigger quarterly returns. The private sector doesn’t need Trump’s permission to eliminate jobs.
We’ve seen this collision between AI and employment coming for years, no matter who sits in the White House. A 2013 Oxford study speculated that nearly half of today’s professions could be eliminated by automation over the next generation. During his 2019 presidential run, candidate Andrew Yang was Paul Revere for what he called “the Fourth Industrial Revolution” of robotics and automation and the disruption it would have on jobs. Three years ago, I myself wrote in Jacobin that AI wasn’t a theoretical threat but a real one for white-collar workers.
That’s why I don’t buy Chris Hayes’s claim that tech oligarchs are suddenly bowing to Trump and will “ultimately turn Marin County into Youngstown, Ohio” — to bleed Silicon Valley dry and turn it into the new Rust Belt. The “war” Hayes describes is actually just the professional class finally experiencing the same precarity that has defined working-class life for half a century. For decades, the social contract of the professional class was built on the idea that if you got the right degrees and mastered the right jargon, you were promised a seat at the table, or at least a comfortable spot in the waiting room. But now, thanks to a wobbly economy and AI, professionals are being proletarianized. Their skills are being deskilled by algorithms, and their specialized knowledge is being commodified into a training set for the next iteration of ChatGPT.
If there is a political opening here, it lies not in proclaiming the PMC as a besieged class but building solidarity across all sectors of labor — from factory floors to tech campuses — and push for collective political solutions: robust social safety nets, job guarantees, public investment in work that markets don’t value, and democratic control over the deployment of transformative technologies.
That’s the politics we need.