Your colleague suddenly vanishes from the team chat. There's no company-wide announcement, no headline-grabbing news. A week later, another desk empties. Welcome to the 'forever layoff' economy, where job cuts no longer arrive as seismic shocks but as a slow, unrelenting drip, reshaping how millions experience employment in 2025.
According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, US companies had cut 1,170,821 jobs by November this year — a 54% increase compared to the same period in 2024. This marks only the sixth time since 1993 that layoffs have exceeded 1.1 million at this point in the year. The only comparable years are 2001, 2002, 2003, 2009, and 2020, when economic downturns or crises prompted similar levels of redundancy.
