In today’s economy, tech companies are red hot. In fact, the companies burning cash on AI seem to be some of the only ones having a truly great time, as the corporate rate of profit plummets throughout the US and recession fears loom.
Though one economist estimates tech companies accounted for 92 percent of US GDP growth in the first half of 2025, you wouldn’t know it by looking at their staff rosters — which seem to be plummeting at an alarming rate.
Amazon, for example, recently laid off 14,000 corporate employees, despite posting billions in profits across numerous lines of business. Across the month of October, tech workers made up the highest number of layoffs in any industry, leading the charge in one of the worst single months for furloughs since 2003.
That’s bad news, of course, but it also directly contradicts the AI industry’s promises of — in the words of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — ushering in “a world in which humanity flourishes to a degree that is probably impossible for any of us to fully visualize yet.”
Sadly, as Business Insider reports, the bloodbath is far from over. On Tuesday, the AI grading company Mercor — which has massive contracts with corporations like OpenAI and Anthropic — suddenly announced it was shuttering a huge project with Meta, leaving workers scrambling. The Meta Project, called Musen, employed some 5,000 data labelers at its peak, and was previously expected to last until at least 2026, according to BI.
“They kept stressing how happy the client was and how it got extended until the end of the year,” one contractor told the publication. “So to then do this major switch up before the holidays took everyone by surprise.”
Luckily for those workers, Mercor is offering to hire them back — just not for Musen. Instead, they’ll have the opportunity work on an extremely similar project named “Nova.” The main difference, it seems, is the wage offered: while Musen’s base contract was $21 an hour, Nova’s opens at $16.
Two tech workers offered a Nova contract said the offer email explained the difference in pay is due to “steadier task volumes across multimedia content” and “higher hour caps, enabling greater weekly engagement.” In other words, data labelers — who already had a bum deal as stable jobs become temporary contract work — get to work more for less pay.
One employee who accepted a contract to work on Nova told BI the work is functionally the same, “but for $5 less an hour.”
“It sounds like most of us are in the same boat,” the worker added. “We wanted to boycott this but are not in a financial place to do so. We needed to have the guaranteed income, even if it’s demoralizing.”
The whole episode underscores the false promises beneath the AI boom: jobs are being degraded, the number of “freelance workers” is soaring, AI-generated profit is almost nonexistent, and rising tides on Wall Street certainly aren’t raising all boats. If this is how the most powerful companies in the world are treating workers now, why would the AI “utopia,” as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella calls it, be any different?
What’s more, if the companies on the cutting edge of a supposed “technological revolution” can’t be expected to take care of their employees, what hope do the rest of us have?
More on labor: The AI Industry Can’t Profit Unless It Replaces Human Jobs, Warns Man Who Helped Create It