Wall Street cheers as workers fear

The layoffs are making headlines this week.

On Tuesday, the oil giant Conocophillips said that it would reduce up to 25% of its workforce, or around 3,250 roles – a model now visible in many other oil and gas companies. Chevron also announced up to 9,000 probable cuts this year. Too much oil on the market and too little confidence in future demand have tightened margins in industry, so companies like Conoco and Chevron rely on shortcuts to preserve cash flows. It makes sense, even if it is not a fairly trendy.

Releases in large technological companies also seem high, but the history of profit and growth in this sector could hardly be more different. Even if the companies display profits from the second trimester record and boast of expanding the margins and breakthroughs of AI, large and smaller players reduce the workforce.

Cup on Salesforce, Oracle, Cisco and others

Salesforce recorded an income of 10% to 10.2 billion dollars on Wednesday and an increase of 11% of its privileged demand measure. Profits have increased and redemptions increased by $ 20 billion. However, the company would also have emptied 4,000 support jobs, CEO Marc Benioff saying that he “needed fewer heads” because AI agents now manage about a million customer conversations.

Oracle also benefits from his own record year. The shares are up 33% of the year later, reaching records this summer while AI cloud demand has increased. Its most recent results, published in the middle of the summer, showed sales of 11% to almost $ 16 billion. Behind the scenes, however, state deposits and workers’ posts show that thousands of jobs disappear across Seattle, California, Texas and Kansas – longtime employees. The next Oracle gains are due on September 9, analysts predicting more positive financial.

Cisco is another example. The company recently declared that hundreds of positions should be reduced, many of which are in software engineering. The announcement came while the company declared an increase of 8% in its recent quarter, with income reaching $ 14.7 billion. It also came in addition to deep cuts in 2024, when Cisco eliminated some 5,000 jobs, about 7% of its workforce, as part of a plan to redirect expenses to “high growth areas”. The Cisco stock increased by around 15% over a year, behind some technological competitors, but still well in advance on the Global S&P 500.

Trend even more marked among the largest stars on the market

Microsoft, during its last quarter, posted sales of almost $ 80 billion and net profit of $ 27 billion, up 24%, with a profit per share in tandem at 24%. The shares have increased by 20% this year, and the company has deeply reduced its workforce at the same time – with 15,000 workers dismissed so far in 2025.

Amazon, which, like Microsoft, spends dozens of billions for various accumulations of AI, has also reduced jobs throughout 2025, while posting sales and profits.

In its latest version, CEO Andy Jassy has expressly linked growth to AI, saying: “Our conviction that AI will change each customer experience is starting to play because we have extended Alexa + to millions of customers, continues to see our shopping agent used by many millions of customers, launched many model makers such as software developers to write the productivity code with our 1m + robots.

“Our AI progress at all levels continue to improve our customer experiences, our speed of innovation, our operational efficiency and our growth in companies, and I am delighted with what awaits us,” concluded Jassy.

The point to take away

Turning the overall trend of technology, Amazon actions have lagged behind the market so far this year.

But taken together, the message seems clear. Efficiency is in, even if it is at the expense of pay – or perhaps explicitly because it is done at the expense of wages. Wall Street keeps enriching companies that adopt AI during the cut, automation and rationalization.

Meanwhile, for workers, the record era is more like an era of record precariousness.