Workers keep leaving the US labor force. Experts can't agree why

Whether it was caregiving responsibilities, feeling discouraged after a long stretch of unemployment or the realization they’re sitting on a pile of money, many Americans have left the workforce entirely.

Over the past year, about 1 million workers have thrown in the towel. In June alone, 720,000 people left the workforce, the Labor Department estimated. The labor force participation rate, or the percentage of those 16 and older who are working or looking for work, fell to 61.5% in June, marking the lowest reading since March 2021. Excluding the lows seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, it represents the lowest rate in five decades. READ MORE

The death of the megacorporation may be a bigger story than layoffs

As AI reshapes how work gets done, some HR leaders say the link between workforce size and business performance is beginning to break down. There is evidence of this from McKinsey, which estimates that generative AI could lift U.S. labor productivity by 0.5%-0.9% a year through 2030, helping companies scale up without proportional hiring.

“For the first time, organizations can increase output, accelerate decision-making and expand market reach without scaling headcount at the same rate,” says Ronni Zehavi, CEO and co-founder of HR technology platform HiBob. He predicts that the organizations that pull ahead will be the ones that can redeploy talent quickly, pair human judgment with machine intelligence and out-adapt their competitors—not necessarily the ones with the largest workforces. READ MORE

Best Remote Job Categories for Senior Professionals in the US

The remote job market in 2026 is large. The part that actually serves senior professionals is much smaller, and the criteria for navigating it are different from what most career advice covers.

Most remote job search guidance is built around the assumption that more applications equal more interviews. For professionals with 10 or more years of experience, the opposite tends to be true. The automated screening layer in enterprise hiring was designed for mid-level roles. It evaluates keyword density, not career context. This means a VP with 20 years across four industries often scores lower than a 4-year analyst who holds the exact keyword the job description specifies. READ MORE

Factories Attach Cameras to Workers, in Hopes of Replacing Them With Robots

Today, sweatshop workers across the Global South are being made to pull double duty: both stitching clothes together, and training robots to put themselves out of work entirely.

New reporting by the Guardian documented this emerging gig taking hold at manufacturing facilities around the world. Outside Delhi, a 32-year-old garment maker identified as Lalita says her factory now requires everyone to strap a GoPro camera to their heads at the start of each shift. READ MORE

Companies are rehiring workers they replaced with AI after automation fell short

Ford $F -0.22%, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, and IBM $IBM +4.26% have each moved to bring back human workers after discovering that artificial intelligence systems could not fully replace the roles they had eliminated, according to CNBC.

Ford spent the past three years hiring 350 veteran engineers to address vehicle quality problems that automated systems had failed to catch. Charles Poon, Ford's vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, said the company had wrongly assumed that feeding AI its design requirements would produce a high-quality product without experienced human oversight. The returning engineers have overhauled the AI tools and now lead troubleshooting sessions, and CEO Jim Farley said the effort has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in savings from declining warranty and recall expenses. READ MORE

Are AI Certifications Worth It?

Learning AI skills has emerged as a common piece of career advice as employers increasingly integrate AI into day-to-day work. This has led to the emergence and rapid expansion of new academic degrees, bootcamps, online courses, and professional certifications. Workers have responded en masse, hoping to stay relevant and incorporate the new technology at work. As the market for AI credentials explodes, it is important to ask: Are these AI certifications worth it?

A recent Brookings Institution working paper using Revelio Labs data offers important context. The authors found that non-degree credentials deliver meaningful wage returns – but only when they are relevant to the worker's occupation. The findings from this study set the stage for the current AI certification wave. Are workers pursuing credentials that are genuinely relevant to their jobs, or are they accumulating low-value certifications that signal engagement with AI without delivering meaningful returns? READ MORE

State Farm agents accuse company of ‘false promises’ after benefits overhaul

As organizations race to keep up with AI advances, no area of people management is free from disruption. This includes benefits and compensation, as evidenced by the recent waves made by insurance giant State Farm.

The more than 100-year-old insurance firm is requiring all 19,000 independent contractors who work as sales agents to sign a new contract by 2027 that includes significant changes to compensation and benefits, according to The Wall Street Journal, which viewed a video of CEO Jon Farney announcing the changes during a recent Las Vegas sales agent convention. READ MORE

What SpaceX’s historic IPO means for recruiting AI talent

SpaceX’s Nasdaq debut on June 12 made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire and turned thousands of employees into millionaires. In fact, according to an analysis by pre-IPO trading platform Hill.com cited by The New York Times, more than 4,400 current and former SpaceX employees are expected to hold stock worth at least $1 million, with roughly 400 holding stakes above $100 million. READ MORE

Kevin O'Leary warns China is winning the AI race because U.S. states are slowing data center production

As data center projects continue to get shut down across the country, "Shark Tank" star Kevin O'Leary and other investors are warning that the facilities are needed to compete with China in the artificial intelligence race.

Data centers are at the forefront of the continued development of AI, serving as the hardware for the large amount of electricity and infrastructure needed to improve response time and data storage. But opponents cite utility costs to local residents and environmental concerns in their efforts to block development of new centers. READ MORE

Finally, a use for corporate bullshit

The other day, China’s Huawei tech giant told the world it was “building an AI data lake to break down data silos” and create “seamless co-ordination between stable online models and agile offline iterations”. Whatever that means.

Before that, the HTX crypto exchange reported the equally baffling news that it had “fortified its security moat while leveraging sharp market insights and rapid execution to consistently capture alpha returns”. READ MORE

AI isn’t killing jobs—copycat layoffs are

Blaming AI for mass layoffs has become common, as companies like Oracle, Meta and Amazon point to increased efficiencies and the need for new investments as reasons for slashing headcount. Yet, that narrative is facing increasing pushback. Industry analyst Josh Bersin, for instance, says companies are miscalculating by focusing on cost reduction over performance improvement, while Wharton’s Peter Cappelli recently wrote for HR Executive that most companies are choosing layoffs to fund data centers or manage financial troubles.

Nobel Prize-winning economic Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google’s DeepMind, an Alphabet subsidiary, has also chimed in. Cutting humans out of the workforce to make way for AI—instead of finding new opportunities for their talent—shows a “lack of imagination,” he recently said. READ MORE

Will Tesla Be Acquired by SpaceX?

Now that SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) has successfully gone public, there is speculation that the company could acquire fellow Elon Musk-back company Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA). Prediction market Kalshi already places the odds of it happening before May 1, 2027, at 54%, while SpaceX President Gwynn Shotwell has also floated the idea, saying it "might make Elon's life a little easier."

The two companies already share resources and personnel and buy products from each other. This includes SpaceX buying nearly $700 million in Tesla Megapack energy storage systems in 2024 and 2025 and $131 million in Cybertrucks. They also have closely aligned boards, and Musk holds 85% of SpaceX's voting power. Musk is also set to develop a giant chip manufacturing facility in conjunction with Intel to produce AI chips for both Tesla and SpaceX. READ MORE

What has SpaceX become?

SpaceX had its initial public offering last week. Now Elon Musk is a trillionaire on paper. But what is SpaceX? On one level, of course, SpaceX is a company that builds rockets and spacecraft and launches them into space. (Occasionally the rockets explode.) It is also the company that birthed Starlink, a satellite-internet business that generated more than $11 billion in revenue last year. READ MORE

X tells 'neglected' Meta employees that it is hiring and will 'exceed any snack budget offer'

Two tech titans are now competing on another battlefield: Employee snacks.

Earlier this month, Meta CTO Andrew "Boz" Bosworth said the company would be taking steps to improve employee morale after successive waves of layoffs and AI strategy pivots. One of those steps, he said in a memo, would be improving the snacks and drinks in its office kitchens. READ MORE

Why Uber is cutting nearly 1/4 of its HR team

Uber is eliminating 23% of the jobs in its People and Places division, which covers human resources, recruitment, workplace facilities and culture. The restructuring is designed to create a “more connected, modern, operationally excellent organization,” according to Jill Hazelbaker, who was promoted to president and chief corporate affairs officer of the ride-sharing service last month.

“As we’ve grown, parts of the organization have become too complex and fragmented, with overlapping responsibilities, unclear ownership and teams operating too far from the businesses and partners they support,” she wrote in a memo to the affected employees. READ MORE

Workers turn to social media for AI training as employers lag

Most U.S. workers using AI on the job are not getting their training from their employer, according to new research. Instead, they are learning from social media, news articles and conversations with friends.

Nexthink data, drawn from 4.9 million sessions per day across 3.4 million employees, found GenAI users average 10 interactions a day and nearly four hours a week using these tools, and that they save roughly the same amount of time in return. READ MORE