At some point in the last fifteen years, it became impolite to speak of the working class. Or rather, impolite to speak of it in the old terms: a class rooted in labour and alienation, bound together not by feelings or values but by structural exploitation. Liberal commentary preferred to divide the world into those with degrees and those without, those with laptops and those with hands. The old workplace was dying, we were told, and with it the industrial relations that had shaped the twentieth century. The factory gave way to the start-up. The shop floor to the Slack channel. It was the end of history, except this time with UX designers.
Now the layoffs are here. And the professionals are being reminded they were workers all along.
The New York Times today reported on the slow bleed of white-collar redundancies. Across industries once thought immune—finance, tech, consultancy, marketing—the firings are not coming in waves but in drips. Managers speak in the sanitised idiom of corporate cruelty: “rebalancing,” “right-sizing,” “optimising teams.” The effect is not a visible cull but a low-level haemorrhage, sustained over months. Jobs vanish without warning. Teams disappear overnight. Colleagues go “on leave” and don’t return.
What’s happening is not a correction; it’s a structural shift. The surplus labour population has arrived at the office door.
William I. Robinson calls it “surplus humanity”: the growing mass of people rendered surplus to the needs of capital. Not just unemployed but structurally unnecessary. Not a temporary layoff, not a blip in the market, but the outcome of an economic order that no longer requires human labour to produce value. Not in the numbers it once did. Not at the price it once paid.
And this isn’t some abstract theory. It’s being lived now, unevenly, violently, in cities where digital professionals get booted by algorithmic decision, and in rural towns where the last warehouse jobs are being phased out by machines that don’t need breaks or healthcare. What’s coming isn’t a reorganisation of labour. It’s its elimination.
The Trump administration’s version of all this is more obscene. It dresses the corpse up and drags it around for the cameras. Talk of a “return to American manufacturing” is little more than political theatre; a last hurrah for manual labour before its programmed extinction. They’re bringing jobs back just long enough to deny benefits, long enough to claim victory, long enough to tighten immigration controls and build more prisons. Then the factories go dark again. This time permanently. The working poor will be left with nothing but gig apps and food banks, drifting between zero-hour contracts and civic abandonment. A society that can no longer employ its own people has two options: repression or redistribution. Guess which path the US has taken.
The professionals, meanwhile, are getting their own initiation into precarity. For decades they were told they were different. They were “talent”, not labour. Precarity was a lifestyle choice. Stress a badge of honour. Burnout could be solved with yoga, or therapy, or a sabbatical in Lisbon. They believed in the meritocracy because it had worked—for them. Until it didn’t.
Now LinkedIn reads like a collective nervous breakdown. “Open to work.” “Exploring new opportunities.” “Reflecting on what’s next.” Behind the euphemisms is panic. Behind the panic, shame.
And maybe, just maybe, behind the shame, something useful. A reckoning. The collapse of that professional-managerial insulation might open the possibility of real solidarity. A recognition that your job title won’t save you. That your degree isn’t a shield. That your career path is just another conveyor belt moving slowly toward the void.
If this class can stop clinging to the fantasy of exemption and see itself, at last, as labour, not exceptional, not elite, just labour, then the field of struggle changes. The terrain broadens. The language sharpens. The story becomes less about personal branding and more about collective resistance. Not “how do I get back in the game”, but “why is the game like this to begin with?”
The layoffs aren’t a mistake. They’re not a market failure. They are the system functioning perfectly. Capital no longer needs us all to work to extract value from us. It’s found other ways: through debt, through rent, through data, through despair.
The real question now is whether we let it keep doing so.
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