Layoffs aren’t new. The dot-com crash wiped out startups almost overnight, and the 2008 financial crisis took entire banks down with it. When COVID shut down offices and local businesses in 2020, huge numbers of people lost their jobs within a few weeks.
All of these examples of job loss were awful. But there was an underlying reason for each of them that people could point to. Revenue dried up, and companies were scrambling to survive.
The current wave of layoffs over the past few years looks different. Many of the companies cutting jobs right now are completely profitable. They’re making these decisions during strong financial stretches, often with plenty of cash in the bank (On the promise of AI? Maybe? Not always). Nobody is pretending the lights are about to go out.
Even though these layoffs are a choice, we feel completely powerless when they happen. Working people are isolated from each other and feel like they have no leverage.
When layoffs stopped needing a reason
Most of us inherited the idea that layoffs are a last resort. Cutting people is the painful final step to keep the business alive.
Yet, Canva announced this week that it was cutting 22% of its workforce. This is a company that previously boasted revenue of $3.5 billion in 2025. Yet the company cited that its growth had slowed, and therefore the cuts were necessary. “Necessary” is more like a preemptive move to protect profit margins, since obviously survival wasn’t on the line.
Canva offered what many praise as a generous severance package. And sure, generous severance is better than no severance. But praising a profitable company for the way it cut more than a fifth of its staff glosses over the decisions it made in the first place. If you have to let almost one-quarter of staff go, people in leadership messed up somewhere along the way. Where’s the accountability for that?
Looking at Canva, specifically, the company touted the development of its own AI systems. I’m a Canva user myself, and I can tell you that its AI capabilities are spectacularly bad. On top of that, Canva is dealing with significant pushback from users who want nothing to do with AI. Those were all the decisions of senior-level executives who drive the direction of the company.
The logic is also often short-sighted. If business picks up next quarter, many of those same roles will need to be filled again. The company will spend money recruiting and training new people to do the work the laid-off employees were already doing well.
So what are companies optimizing for? For the most part, shareholders and the next quarter’s financial statement. A lot of companies make these decisions in reactive mode.
Where our power comes from
Most of the advice after a layoff is individual. Update your resume and start networking. All that matters is when rent or mortgage is due and paying for basic needs. It reinforces the idea that each of us is completely on our own.
But we actually have power. Even when we have individual employers. When people act together, they have a voice that’s hard to ignore.
Collective attitudes shape how companies behave over time. The praise for Canva’s severance package is a small example. When the public conversation celebrates a company for how it lays people off, there’s little reason for the next company to act better and maybe reconsider layoffs in the first place. When that conversation shifts, and more people start asking why a profitable company is cutting jobs in the first place, other companies will be forced to pay attention and consider their reputation.
People can push back on companies that mistreat employees or put profits over people. The Canva example could have been a condemnation of layoffs overall instead of praise for the particulars.
A changing attitude won’t pay the mortgage for someone who lost their job this week. But it goes a long way toward pushing companies to take a more people-first approach in the future.
If you’re feeling heavy about work right now, you’re not imagining it. A lot of people feel the same way, even if they aren’t saying it out loud.
But we’re not powerless. Our power is very hard to find when we’re alone. It starts with the people around you, like a former coworker you haven’t talked to in a long time, or a friend who went through a layoff last year and knows what this feels like.
Reach out to one of them.
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