| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Saturday, July 5, 2025
Labor Notes
Friday, July 4, 2025
Layoffs at UPS and Microsoft Highlight Economic Shifts and Technological Upheaval
This week brought sobering news for American workers as both United Parcel Service (UPS) and Microsoft announced significant job cuts, signaling deeper transformations in the logistics and tech industries. These developments reflect a broader shift toward automation, artificial intelligence, and corporate restructuring—at the expense of labor stability.
At UPS, up to 20,000 jobs are on the chopping block as the company executes what it calls a “network reconfiguration.” The company is closing 73 U.S. facilities as it pulls back from overreliance on Amazon deliveries and responds to declining package volumes. Instead of abrupt firings, UPS has begun offering voluntary buyout packages to its full-time drivers. These packages include pension and health benefits, but the move has drawn sharp criticism from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Union leadership argues that the company is violating the spirit, if not the letter, of its national contract, which mandates the creation of 22,500 new union jobs.
The company's restructuring comes amid ongoing automation in shipping and warehousing, rising costs, and global economic instability. Earlier this year, UPS closed major hubs in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin—moves that signal a long-term realignment in how the company manages logistics. Some analysts see this as the largest transformation of UPS’s infrastructure in decades, one designed to cut costs and compete more aggressively with Amazon and FedEx. But the timing, just months after a much-publicized contract negotiation with the Teamsters, has many workers feeling blindsided.
While UPS sheds labor in the physical world, Microsoft is doing the same in the digital. This week, the company confirmed it will cut approximately 9,000 employees—about 4 percent of its global workforce—as it pivots even more aggressively into artificial intelligence. The layoffs affect sales, marketing, and engineering divisions, but some of the most significant cuts came from the Xbox gaming division. Entire studios have been shuttered, including The Initiative, and long-anticipated projects such as the “Perfect Dark” reboot and Rare’s Everwild have been quietly canceled.
Microsoft leadership has said the cuts are intended to reduce management layers and “streamline for innovation,” but internally, the mood is grim. One executive was criticized for suggesting that laid-off staff should use Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT to deal with the emotional fallout and rewrite their résumés. The post was quickly deleted, but it underscores the growing disconnect between executive leadership and a fatigued workforce. The tech giant is reportedly spending close to $80 billion on AI infrastructure this fiscal year, and workers are feeling the cost.
This is not the first round of layoffs at Microsoft in 2025. The company had previously let go of thousands of employees in January and March as it accelerated AI hiring and scaled down non-essential departments. Workers in online forums and internal Slack groups have expressed confusion and frustration over repeated restructuring that often comes with little transparency or warning.
These two major corporate announcements offer a powerful case study in the forces reshaping the modern economy. At UPS, the pressure comes from changing consumer behavior, automation, and strained labor-management relations. At Microsoft, it’s about replacing human capital with machine learning and making deep structural changes to chase higher profits in an AI-first world. In both cases, the workers pay the price.
For students and faculty in higher education—especially those studying labor relations, supply chain management, computer science, and organizational behavior—these events are a stark reminder that stability in the job market is no longer a given. The old promises of lifelong employment or career ladders within major corporations are being eroded by technological disruption and financialization.
Universities may trumpet partnerships with Microsoft or logistics giants like UPS, but they must also reckon with what these partnerships mean for the future of work. Are students being trained for careers that may not exist in five years? Are institutions complicit in funneling talent into systems that undervalue human labor?
Layoffs at this scale are not isolated events. They are structural. And for millions of Americans—workers, students, graduates—they represent not just temporary hardship, but a preview of the next economic reality.
Sources: Reuters, The Times UK, ABC7, Supply Chain Dive, Polygon, The Verge, Reddit, Teamsters.org
Documents from Education Department (includes 90/10 Rule and Income-Driven Repayment)
| ||||||||||||||||
July 4th in the Face of Fascism: Moral resources for Americans who know we’ve been betrayed (William Barber & Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove)
 |
On America’s 249th anniversary of declaring freedom from tyranny, a would-be king will celebrate Independence Day by signing a budget bill that Americans oppose 2 to 1.
This Big Ugly Bill that was passed by Republicans in Congress this week will make the largest cuts to healthcare and nutrition assistance in our nation’s history to pay for tax cuts for people who do not need them and an assault on our communities by masked men who are disappearing our neighbors to concentration camps. The dystopian scene is enough to make any true believer in liberty and equality question whether they can celebrate Independence Day at all. But it would be a betrayal of our moral inheritance to not remember the true champions of American freedom on this day. Indeed, to forget them would mean losing the moral resources we need to revive American democracy.
As bad as things are, we cannot forget that others faced worse with less resources than we have. We are not the first Americans to face a power-drunk minority in public office, determined to hold onto power at any cost. This was the everyday reality of Black Americans in the Mississippi Delta for nearly a century after the Klan and white conservatives carried out the Mississippi Plan in the 1870s, erasing the gains of Reconstruction and enshrining white supremacy in law.
When Ms. Fannie Lou Hamer decided to join the freedom movement in Sunflower County, Mississippi, she knew two things: the majority of people in Sunflower County despised the policies of Senator James O. Eastland and Eastland’s party had the votes to get whatever they wanted written into law. The day she dared attempt to register to vote, Ms. Hamer lost her home. When she attended a training to learn how to build a movement that could vote, she was thrown into the Winona Jail and nearly beaten to death. Still, Ms. Hamer did not bow.
Instead, she leaned into the gospel blues tradition that had grown out of the Delta, spreading the good news that God is on the side of those who do not look away from this world’s troubles but trust that a force more powerful than tyrants is on the side of the oppressed and can make a way out of no way to redeem the soul of America. “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine,” she sang, and a generation of college student volunteers came to sing with her during Freedom Summer. Their mission was to register voters and teach the promises of democracy to Mississippi’s Black children in Freedom Schools.
On July 4, 1964, Ms. Hamer hosted a picnic for Black and white volunteers who’d dedicated their summer to nonviolently facing down fascism on American soil. They celebrated the promise that all are created equal even as they faced death for living as if it were true. Those same young people who were at Hamer’s July 4th picnic went on to launch the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and take their challenge all the way to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City that August. “I question America,” Ms. Hamer said in her testimony that aired on the national news during coverage of the convention. “Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”
Hamer and the MFDP didn’t win the seats they demanded at the 1964 convention, but Atlantic City would be the last convention to seat an all-white delegation from Mississippi. Just a year later, as part of the War on Poverty, Congress passed the Medicare and Medicaid Act, expanding access to healthcare to elderly and low-income Americans – an expansion that Trump is rolling back half a century later in an immoral betrayal of the very people he promised to champion in his fake populist appeal to poor and working people.
There’s nothing un-American about questioning a fascism that defies the will of the people to terrorize American communities and assert total control. It has been the moral responsibility of moral leaders from Frederick Douglass, who asked, “what to the slave is the 4th of July?” to those who are asking today how Americans are supposed to celebrate when their elected leaders sell them out to billionaires and send masked men to assault their communities. Ms. Hamer is a vivid reminder of the moral wisdom that grows out of the Mississippi Delta. It teaches us that those who question America when we allow fascists to rule are not un-American. They are, in fact, the people who have helped America become more of what she claims to be.
So this 4th of July, may we all gather with Fannie Lou Hamer and the moral fusion family closest to us – both the living and the dead – to recommit ourselves to a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Yes, America’s fascists have the power today. They will throw a party at our House and desecrate the memory of so many who’ve worked to push us toward a more perfect union. But they will not own our Independence Day. As long as we remember the moral tradition that allowed Fannie Lou Hamer to host a July 4th picnic while she battled the fascism of Jim Crow, we have access to the moral resources we need to reconstruct American democracy today.
 |
This is why today, as all American’s celebrate our nation’s declaration of liberty and equality, we are announcing that the Moral Monday campaign we’ve been organizing in Washington, DC, to challenge the policy violence of this Big Ugly Bill is going to the Delta July 14th for Moral Monday in Memphis. As we rally moral witnesses in the city of Graceland and the Delta blues – the place where Dr. King insisted in 1968 that the movement “begins and ends” – delegations of moral leaders and directly impacted people will visit Congressional offices across the South to tell the stories of the people who will be harmed by the Big, Ugly, and Deadly bill that Donald Trump is signing today.
Yes, this bill will kill. But we are determined to organize a resurrection of people from every race, religion, and region of this country who know that, when we come together in the power of our best moral traditions, we can reconstruct American democracy and become the nation we’ve never yet been.
Today’s neo-fascists have passed their Big Ugly Bill, but they have also sparked a new Freedom Summer. We will organize those this bill harms. We will mobilize a new coalition of Americans who see beyond the narrow divisions of left and right. We will lean into the wisdom of Ms. Hamer and Delta’s freedom struggle, and we will build a moral fusion movement to save America from this madness.
You’re currently a free subscriber to Our Moral Moment w/ Bishop William Barber & Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove. Our Moral Moment is and always will be a free publication. We’re grateful to those who opt for a paid subscription to support this work.