Why companies are no longer hanging on to employees

Companies scrambled for years after the pandemic to build back their workforces, learning a simple lesson along the way: Keep the workers you’ve got, because if you lose them you will have a hard time getting them back.

The job market has softened in recent months, however, marking a safer environment for companies to start streamlining their workforces. A host of them have pounced, including Amazon.com, UPS, Target and Meta Platforms, which have announced tens of thousands of layoffs in recent weeks.

It is a shift that could have major repercussions for U.S. workers. Over the past two years, U.S. businesses have become increasingly reluctant to bring new employees on, especially as more recent uncertainty over the direction of tariffs made it harder to plan ahead. But they have also been hesitant to cut the employees they already have, an example of what economists term “labor hoarding."

The result has been a low-hire, low-fire environment, in which recent graduates and others trying to break into the job market have struggled, but workers who are already employed have been largely insulated.

Now things are looking a bit more like the 1990s, when many big companies were focused on eliminating workers they felt were no longer needed, according to Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM.

Back then, “we used to reward companies for letting people go," he said

A number of things could be at play in companies’ increasing comfort with layoffs, including optimism over artificial intelligence, but they all come down to the bottom line. Labor is a major cost, and cutting it is one way to bolster profit margins. Tariffs could be adding to the urgency, especially for companies weighing whether and how to pass through the higher costs they are paying for goods on to consumers.

Some companies also added to their payrolls as they moved to keep up with the surge in demand that came in the pandemic’s wake, and may now feel that they are bloated. Amazon had about 800,000 employees at the end of 2019, and about 1.5 million at the end of last year.

In a memo to staff last week explaining Target’s plan to cut 1,800 corporate roles, incoming chief executive Michael Fiddelke said, “Too many layers and overlapping work have slowed decisions, making it harder to bring ideas to life."

It probably helps, too, that investors have appeared to welcome job cuts. Target’s stock edged up on the day it announced layoffs. When Amazon on Tuesday said it was laying off 14,000 workers, with more to come, its stock rose 1%. When UPS disclosed it had cut 48,000 management and operations positions when it reported earnings on Tuesday, Wall Street’s focus was on its strong results, and its stock rallied 8%.

Nor are companies any more in an environment where hiring back workers would be anything like the struggle it was after the economy began to reopen from the Covid crisis. Then, workers could largely pick and choose between competing offers.

The unemployment rate, which fell to a multidecade low of 3.4% in April 2023, was 4.3% as of August. Many Americans are operating under the assumption that the jobs picture will get worse: 64% of consumers polled by the University of Michigan this month said they expected higher unemployment over the next 12 months, compared with 32% in October 2024.

One risk for the broader economy: In an environment where employment growth is already low, any increase in layoffs could lead the economy to start shedding jobs. In August—the last month of available data before the government shutdown delayed Labor Department economic releases—the U.S. added just 22,000 jobs.

Whether the recent run of layoff announcements augurs a downturn in the job market isn’t clear, said Jed Kolko, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. While those layoff numbers are eye-catching, they don’t necessarily reflect what is going on in a labor force of over 170 million people, he said.

“You need the whole picture, and that whole picture comes from data that are not being released during the shutdown," Kolko said.

For companies, enthusiasm over the possibility to automate more work with AI is also playing a role. The Federal Reserve’s latest beige book, which compiles economic anecdotes from the 12 regional Fed banks, reported that more employers were reducing head counts through layoffs and attrition “with contacts citing weaker demand, elevated economic uncertainty, and, in some cases, increased investment in artificial intelligence technologies."

While there is evidence that AI is cutting into demand for certain jobs, such as software development, the degree to which it is more broadly automating away jobs is difficult to tease out, points out Kolko.

But even if they haven’t been able to widely implement AI yet, a belief that they someday will could increase some employers’ comfort with abandoning labor hoarding. Companies including Walmart, Ford, JPMorgan Chase and Amazon have said that they expect AI will allow them to eliminate jobs.

“Labor hoarding was especially pronounced in higher-wage jobs, where employees are harder to find and therefore more costly to lose," he said. “Those tended to be tech industries and other professional industries, and those overlap with some of the industries that could be most affected by AI."

Write to Justin Lahart at Justin.Lahart@wsj.com