To an extent they can......but mostly no.
not for skilled trades; but for stoopid manual labor for sure.
And at least manual labor has unions to fight that fight.
Yeah but the trickle down effect. Folks celebrating tech bros losing jobs don’t realize it circles back and hits everyone
These oligarchs aren’t trying to create new opportunities; they’re trying to run entire industries with as few workers as possible. When engineers, designers, analysts, and support staff are laid off, that’s thousands of people suddenly not spending. No dinners out. No new phones. No gym memberships. No daycare upgrades. No vacations. Then the ripple spreads.
The neighborhood restaurant loses regulars and shuts down.
Retail stores see slower sales and cut staff.
Landlords feel it when rent payments start slipping.
Airlines need bailouts or go under.
Cities lose tax revenue, so public services get cut.
Even people who think they’re “safe” aren’t. Gig workers get squeezed when Waymo-style self-driving cars replace rideshare drivers. Delivery drivers get undercut by drones and automated fulfillment. Warehouse jobs shrink as robotics scale up. Customer service roles vanish into AI chatbots. Marketing, accounting, paralegals same story.
When fewer people earn money, fewer people spend money. And when spending drops, small businesses die first, not billionaires. The rich still eat. Still travel. Still invest. Everyone else fights over fewer scraps.
So yeah, cheering layoffs because “they made more than me” is short-sighted. An economy can’t survive when productivity rises but wages and jobs disappear. You can’t automate your way to prosperity if no one can afford to buy what’s being produced.
Unions protect workers inside but they can’t protect a job that’s been eliminated. If an entire department is automated, outsourced, or “restructured,” seniority doesn’t matter. I've seen it any my work (hospital) they got rid of the whole unionized department for health records before it was manual and then became electronic. They were just given a decent severance package and given notice but being in a union did not protect them.
