The 42% That Never Recovered: Labor Market Data Reveals the Permanent Decline of Management
The following contribution comes from the Medium portal, which defines itself as follows: Medium is a space for human stories and ideas. Here, anyone can share knowledge and wisdom with the world, without needing to build an email list or followers. The internet is noisy and chaotic; Medium is quiet, but brimming with information. It’s simple, engaging, collaborative, and helps you find the right readers for what you have to say.
The author is Marc Bara, a member of the team.
Data from job postings, corporate announcements, and academic research confirm that the elimination of middle management is accelerating.
Last week, I presented The Great Reversal: the counterintuitive pattern where AI eliminates managerial coordination functions faster than physical warehouse work. I used Amazon’s October 29 announcement as a prime example: 14,000 corporate positions eliminated immediately, while leaked internal documents reveal plans to avoid hiring 600,000 warehouse workers by 2033.
But Amazon didn’t create this pattern. It revealed it.
Since then, I’ve analyzed broader evidence from August to November 2025: job posting data, corporate announcements, consulting firm research, and labor market analysis.
What emerges is unmistakable. The Big Turnaround isn’t a single-company restructuring.
It’s a systemic transformation across all sectors, and the data clearly demonstrates this.
What Job Postings Reveal About Who Is Really Being Eliminated
While corporate press releases emphasize culture and agility, the labor market tells a different story through job posting data.
The Great Decline
Revelio Labs, which tracks more than 100 million job profiles, found that job postings for mid-level managers fell 42% from their peak in April 2022 to October 2025. Postings for entry-level and operational positions reached a low of 14% at their worst point, before recovering. Postings for executive positions showed no recovery until November 2025.
This 42% decline has persisted for months with no sign of recovery.
This isn’t a hiring freeze affecting all positions equally. It’s the structural elimination of specific roles.
Live Data Technologies’ analysis of employment records showed that managerial positions declined by 6.1% between May 2022 and May 2025. Even more telling: middle management accounted for 32% of layoffs in 2023, compared to 20% in 2019, representing a 60% increase in management’s share of staff reductions.
Gusto’s analysis of 8,500 small and medium-sized businesses revealed that supervisors’ span of control doubled, from three direct reports in 2019 to six in 2025. Organizations are eliminating supervisory levels, not just temporarily freezing hiring.
The pattern is clear. Managerial positions are being structurally removed from organizational structures. Companies aren’t planning to fill these positions when conditions improve. They are redesigning their operations to function without them.
This validates what Amazon has shown: coordination roles are being eliminated now,
while operational roles face displacement over a longer period due to the development of robotics.
UPS’s Breakdown: When a Company Actually Shows the Numbers
Most companies announce total layoffs without revealing how many are managers and how many are operational workers. UPS provided the breakdown, and the numbers are striking.
Through October 2025, UPS eliminated 14,000 managerial positions and 34,000 operational positions. Management represented approximately 18% of the affected workforce, with roughly 78,000 managers in total in the pre-cut structure.
Do the math. Management accounted for 29% of the total cuts despite representing approximately 18% of the affected workforce categories. That’s 1.6 times their proportional representation.
Operational workers accounted for 71% of the cuts, despite representing approximately 82% of the workforce in those categories. This is 0.87 times their proportional representation.
Eliminating Management Positions
Management positions are being cut at nearly twice the rate expected if the impact were distributed evenly.
The Business Contraction Argument
Critics are right to point out that UPS’s cuts are closely tied to Amazon’s declining volume (down 5.4% year-over-year in the first half of 2025) and the closure of 93 facilities to eliminate excess capacity. When you lose a low-margin business, you generally need fewer people.
That’s true, but the distribution of the cuts is important. Traditional downsizing logic predicted that operational positions (drivers, sorters) would absorb most of the reductions. Instead, UPS cut management positions at a rate 1.6 times higher than its overall workforce (29% of total cuts versus 18% of the workforce), while preserving core physical capacity through voluntary buyouts and seasonal flexibility.
This reflects a calculation of which roles can now be replaced by automation tools like AI (coordination and reporting) and which still require human presence in unstructured environments. Even under the pressure of downsizing, investment is holding steady.
Moreover, UPS’s pattern is not isolated.
It is observed in companies facing very different business conditions: Amazon (rapidly growing), Target (stable), Microsoft (profitable), CVS (expanding), and hospitals (with staffing shortages). The common factor is not business downsizing, but rather the availability of AI for coordination work versus robotics that is too immature for physical labor.
This is the Big Investment quantified. Faced with the pressure to reduce costs, companies are now disproportionately cutting coordination roles because AI can replace them. Traditional automation patterns would have predicted the opposite.
The Pattern Spans All Sectors
The Big Investment is not limited to Amazon, UPS, or tech companies. It is transforming traditional sectors with a consistent pattern: protecting operational workers and eliminating layers of coordination.
Retail headquarters protect stores:
Target: 1,800 corporate positions cut (8% of headquarters staff), no store workers affected. Chief Operating Officer Michael Fiddelke: «Overstaffing and overlapping roles have slowed decision-making.»
CVS: 2,900 cuts with an explicit statement that «the reductions will NOT affect frontline positions in stores, pharmacies, and distribution centers.»
Walmart: 1,500 corporate and technology positions eliminated, maintaining all store operations.
Tech companies explicitly eliminate staff:
Microsoft: More than 15,000 positions (9,000 in July, 6,000 in May) focused on «reducing staff with fewer managers.» Security teams doubled their control, from 5.5 to 10 direct reports.
Amazon: 14,000 corporate cuts and a mandatory 15% increase in the IC-to-manager ratio by the first quarter of 2025. CEO Andy Jassy: “When you bring in a lot of people, you end up with a lot of middle managers who want to put their stamp on everything.” Healthcare administration faces targeted cuts:
Cleveland Clinic: 114 administrative positions
Main Line Health: 200 administrative and management positions
Tower Health: Cuts primarily targeting management positions
UCSF Health: 200 positions, primarily management and administrative
Clinical staff providing direct patient care remained largely intact across all systems
The banking sector is cutting back-office and management positions
JPMorgan: Multiple rounds of cuts to reduce management levels
Deutsche Bank: 3,500 cuts targeting back-office and senior management roles
The pattern is repeating itself across all sectors: corporate coordination is being eliminated, frontline operations are being protected.
What the consulting firms predicted
Leading research organizations detected the emergence of this pattern and published forecasts that align precisely with what is unfolding.
Gartner’s October 2024 prediction stated: «Through 2026, 20% of organizations will use AI to simplify their organizational structure, eliminating more than half of today’s middle management roles.»
Distinguished vice president and analyst Daryl Plummer explained that AI will automate scheduling, reporting, and performance monitoring—key functions of middle management. The remaining managers will oversee larger teams with greater control.
McKinsey’s «State of AI» report from March 2025
revealed that 58% of tasks related to applying expertise could be automated, and 49% of managerial work (creating job offers, integrating performance feedback, and basic coordination) is automatable.
Their analysis showed that less than 30% of managers’ time is spent on people leadership, with three-quarters dedicated to individual execution or administrative tasks, now vulnerable to automation.
Deloitte’s «Global Human Capital Trends 2025» survey
of 10,000 business and HR leaders in 93 countries revealed that managers spend 40% of their time on administrative and problem-solving tasks, and only 13% on people development. The report concluded that “the traditional role of managers is ripe for reinvention” as AI transforms work by “reducing entry-level positions” and creating a need to support the evolution of middle management.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs 2025 Report, which surveyed more than 1,000 employers representing over 14 million workers in 55 economies, included Business Services and Administration Managers among the 10 fastest-declining jobs. The report projected that 22% of current jobs would be affected by 2030 (170 million created, 92 million eliminated), with administrative assistants, executive secretaries, and bookkeepers topping the decline list.
Meanwhile, the fastest-growing jobs included agricultural workers (projected to create 35 million new jobs), delivery drivers, construction workers, and nursing professionals. Predominantly operational positions requiring physical presence and handling.
These were not speculative opinion pieces. They were systematic surveys of employers’ actual hiring and layoff plans.
AI dismantles middle management positions, the most affected since the crisis
The following contribution comes from the Ara media portal and is authored by Albert Rigol, a member of the team.
Workers’ salaries recover their pre-2007 purchasing power.
The exceptional salary growth of entry-level workers over the past year, especially those working in small companies, has allowed this group to gain purchasing power compared to 2007: while accumulated inflation over the last 19 years is 43.5%, the salaries of entry-level workers have increased by 45.89%, to 28%.
This is confirmed by the latest edition of the study «Salary Evolution 2007-2025». The report, presented this Wednesday at a press conference by the Eada business school and the human resources consultancy ICSA, is based on a survey of 80,000 workers.
The negative note is struck by workers in middle management positions, who have experienced the greatest cumulative loss of purchasing power. Their salaries, averaging €42,822 in 2025, have grown by 23.04% since 2007, well below the cumulative inflation rate of 4%. These positions have also suffered a «dismantling,» according to Ernesto Poveda, CEO of ICSA Group, largely due to the incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI) into the workplace, which is causing an «organizational flattening,» eliminating two other categories: managers and workers. The challenge of AI
«We see it in many positions: as a professor, in research, where it helps to write articles; we also see it in banking and in administrative and management positions. AI has played a fundamental role; it is our greatest ally or a competitor,» explained Anton-Giulio Manganelli, professor of strategy at EADA.
As for executives, who earn an average of €90,226, the cumulative increase is 31.35%. Historically, this segment has always seen the largest increases, but a shift occurred in 2025 because, according to the study, compensation models are based on linear increases and have favored entry-level workers, since middle and upper management positions are more closely tied to company performance. Manganelli also highlighted that salary increases across different categories, compared to GDP growth over the last 19 years, show that wages have not increased at the same rate as GDP per capita.
«This means that wealth is being created, but it is not being distributed equitably,» he stated. He also emphasized the level of absenteeism in the Spanish economy, with one million unemployed workers per day, as a worrying factor, representing an unacceptable cost for any organization. Upturn in Small Businesses
One of the most notable findings of the study, according to its authors, is the 8.72% increase in wages for entry-level workers in SMEs. They attributed this to the need for small businesses to raise wages to respond to the continued recruitment of workers by medium and large companies, as well as to increases in the national minimum wage (SMI), collective bargaining agreements partially indexed to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), and greater technological advancements in operational positions.
The wage increase for entry-level workers in medium and large companies was 3.1% and 4.2%, respectively, significantly higher than that of any other category (entry-level, middle management, or executives) in any of the three types of companies. Training and new compensation models.
To address current labor market challenges, such as the application of AI, the study concludes that it is necessary to invest in continuous training, especially for middle management, and to redesign total compensation models by linking them to productivity. «It is necessary to move towards more flexible and sustainable compensation schemes, aligned with the actual contribution of each position,» the study states. Another proposal is to promote non-monetary compensation as a non-competitive advantage, through teleworking, flexible hours, work-life balance initiatives, and continuous training.
Agility is the new competitive advantage
The following contribution comes from the Sandvik website, which describes itself as follows: The company was founded in 1862 by Göran Fredrik Göransson, a global pioneer in successfully implementing the Bessemer process for industrial-scale steel production. From its inception, operations focused on high quality and added value, investment in R&D, close customer relationships, and exports. This strategy has remained unchanged throughout the years.
As early as the 1860s, the product range included rock drilling steel. The company began trading on the Stockholm Stock Exchange in 1901. Stainless steel production began in 1921, and cemented carbide production in 1942. Production of cemented carbide tools began in the 1950s in Gimo, Sweden.
In 1972, the company changed its name to Sandvik AB, and in 1984, a new type of organization was introduced, with a parent company and independent business areas.
Authorship by the team.
The pandemic changed the perspective on business agility, and adapting to market fluctuations is now more important than ever. Being agile throughout the cycle is a strategic objective of Sandvik’s “Make the Shift” strategy.
In his landmark book “On the Origin of Species,” Charles Darwin wrote that it is not the strongest or the most intelligent species that survive, but those that are most adaptable to change. In our turbulent world, this agility could be the key to why some companies persevere and even thrive in challenging times.
Rising inflation, recession concerns, and geopolitical nervousness combine to create a difficult environment for businesses worldwide. And with this challenging environment, a new focus on business agility has emerged, not only to address recurring cyclical fluctuations but also to adapt to unprecedented events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting market upheaval and supply chain disruptions.
