#costcutting

Bank of America expands apprenticeship program with 1,000 new hires | Fox Business https://share.google/lCADGQtJ2JJue55jc

This is what they do- force out the high paying or tenured employees and bring in apprentices and pay them so much less

Bill Burr on AI: “Why don’t they make an AI CEO? They’re making way more than all the workers. You’re going to save way more money replacing one guy. Why don’t you do that? Because it’s not for us. It’s for them.”

There's been a lot of anger and frustration directed at leadership lately, and given everything that's changing, that's completely understandable. But I wanted to step back from the noise for a moment and look at where we actually stand, soberly and with the numbers in front of us.

Let's start with the basics: we're a company that makes a lot of money. In 2025, we generated $124 billion in revenue, $36 billion in EBITDA, and $20 billion in net income. Our balance sheet carries about $90 billion in net debt — a large number in isolation, but very manageable set against our revenue and profitability.

So why is our stock falling, and why does it feel like every quarter brings another round of cost cuts?

The answer isn't in where we are today. It's in where the business is headed. I'll set NBCUniversal aside for this and focus on our Connectivity business, since that's the bulk of our revenue. Let's go through it line by line.

Broadband brought in $26 billion last year — 20% of our total revenue. It's declining, and faster than most of us expected. We lost 650,000 of our 29 million subscribers, and to slow that decline, we've had to lower prices across the board: average price per customer fell 3.8% last quarter alone. To put that in perspective, a 3.8% price drop on $26 billion is roughly $1 billion in lost revenue — and lost profit — from pricing alone. Add the subscriber losses, and that's another half a billion. The uncomfortable truth is that the driver here isn't primarily service quality, even though that plays a role — it's competition. We used to compete against DSL as our main rival. Today we're being overbuilt almost everywhere, by fiber, by fixed wireless, and soon by satellite too. If that trend continues, and there's every reason to think it will, we're looking at millions more subscribers lost in the years ahead.

Cable TV is still a cash cow, also generating around $26 billion in revenue in 2025. But our subscriber base has fallen from 25 million to 10 million over the past decade-plus. This is structural, not cyclical, decline. The only reason revenue has held up this well is a combination of steady price increases and our success at retaining higher-value customers. But make no mistake: the decline here is terminal. This business will eventually disappear — what we're managing is the pace of that decline, not whether it happens. Our advertising revenue, another $4 billion, moves down right alongside it.

Landline voice is something many of us already think of as "dead," but it's still about $3 billion in revenue, and it's shrinking roughly 20% a year.

Comcast Business brings in $10 billion. The problem here is that our SMB segment faces the exact same competitive pressure as residential, and we're losing customers at an accelerating pace as fiber and fixed wireless take share. Enterprise can still grow, but at meaningfully lower margins — it's a far more labor-intensive business, and enterprise customers expect deeper discounts.

Wireless brings in about $5 billion — $1.3 billion in equipment, $3.6 billion in service. Once you account for phone subsidies to win new customers, churn, operating costs, and the fees we pay our MVNO partner, this is a thin-margin business. It can absolutely keep growing, but how much profit it can actually generate is a real question — and the growth ceiling is capped by our broadband base. As broadband shrinks, so does the ceiling for wireless.

Putting it all together, here's how I'd forecast each piece going forward:

Broadband: $26B, declining ~5% a year
TV: $26B, declining ~10% a year
Advertising: $4B, declining ~10% a year
Landline Voice: $3B, declining ~20% a year
Comcast Business: $10B, flat at best
Wireless: $5B, growing ~15% a year

(There's also roughly $5 billion in international connectivity — that's Sky, and it moves over to NBCUniversal as part of the separation.)

Here's the part that makes this especially painful: our margin structure. When we lose a broadband subscriber, our costs barely move — nearly all of our cost base is fixed. The contribution margin on the last customer we add, or lose, is over 90%. That means when a customer leaves, profit falls almost as much as revenue does.

So here's where that leaves us: a business that's declining quickly, with margins shrinking just as fast. Cutting overhead and discretionary spend is the lever we have in the near term to protect the business — but let's be clear-eyed about it: that lever doesn't fix the underlying problem. It just buys us time.

So our stock is in a freefall and the only way to float the stock price is to cut expenses (overhead). We are spending money on fiber and need capital back. So 9/24 or whatever date in October is going to happen. We're bleeding money, and the iPhone isn't saving us. Most iPhone models are not in stock to ship till October. So Q3 is a dumpster fire at this point, hopefully Q4 is better. Either way I think we are all at risk, so bring on Dan the Hatchet Man.

Pharmaceutical giant Bristol Myers Squibb is implementing another round of layoffs, impacting 265 employees at its Princeton headquarters. This marks the third wave of job cuts disclosed by the company in New Jersey this year. The reductions are part of a broader cost-saving initiative aiming to cut $2 billion by the end of 2027. These latest layoffs are scheduled to commence in December 2026 and continue into May 2027. The company has now seen over 1,700 positions eliminated in New Jersey since January 2025.

Princeton, New Jersey

https://www.nj.com/business/2026/09/pharmaceutical-giant-to-lay-off-265-nj-workers-in-3rd-wave-of-job-cuts-this-year.html

• Wells Fargo shed almost 80,000 workers since 2019 and expects more cuts.
• The bank uses autonomous coding agents to replace hiring and contractor work.
• AI helps Wells Fargo reduce costs in legal, finance and call center operations.

https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2026/09/15/wells-fargo-layoffs-ai-technology-cfo-productivity.html

Basically confirming a lot of us will lose our jobs to India and GCC.

Her email said we need to manage our expenses as year end goals.

Expenses = layoffs of employees

If it was about lean and mean and cost cutting, why are there so many contractors? In 2018, they said the ratios of FTE to contractors is very bad so they will hire more full time. Fast forward, contractors have multiplied but FTE roles haven't grown proportionately. Wonder why they are OK spending so much on external talent while the FTEs are few and are swamped always. Have seen team sizes just multiply in some areas and there are like 50+ contractors in one team. A team used to be around 16 is easily a ove 50 since covid. What's the deal? Why dont they hire more FTE and build internal knowledge? Does Trump know these stats?

After taking walgreens private, sycamore apponted mike motz as ceo... motz previously ran staples us retail another sycamore-owned business.

that history is worth watching... sycamore bought staples in 2017. it later pursued a recapitalization that would add about $1B in debt while allowing sycamore to pull about $1B of its investment back out. genius...

Walgreens employees are now seeing some similar things... tighter costs. org changes. job cuts. more work moving overseas. heavy focus on opex.

some folks here on layoffs.com here have already started calling it Staples 2.0.

this does not mean walgreens will follow the same path as staples. but sycamore owns both companies. walgreens is now led by the former ceo of staples us retail...

the similarities make staples a useful case study for us who are trying to figure out what maybe coming next.

Q3 results are way off. CEO will tell a story on earnings that it is a hardware expectation. Layoffs will be large & supply chain logical. High cost country resources & SG&A like technicians and vehicles/fleet will be resized.

Wow, here in Switzerland, the word is that with the recent setbacks in clinical trials and abandoned dr-g candidates, leadership needs to save more money. Well, one site that could be jeopardized is the one in San Diego. Expect serious reductions in footprint and headcount!!

The Bleeding Starts With the Math
BNY associates aren’t imagining the hemorrhage — the offshoring cuts to Pune, Chennai, and Wroclaw are real and accelerating. And the wound is wide open because the math is brutal. A mid-level engineer in Pune earns $10–20K a year while the same role in NYC/NJ costs $110–150K+. Senior U.S. engineers can run $285K fully loaded, compared to $28–50/hr offshore. Data analysts are 80% cheaper, project managers 79%, customer support 94%.
With numbers like that, the Executive Committee doesn’t see people — it sees savings. And when leadership smells a 7–10x cost reduction, it smells blood in the water and bonuses in their pocket-lined gills.

Where the Bleeding Hits Hardest
Tech engineering, QA, reconciliations, onboarding, client ops, shared services — these job families are already losing blood fast. Under Robin Vince, the playbook is predictable: expand India and Poland, shift repeatable U.S. work offshore, backfill optics with visa hires and state college grads, then quietly “realign” experienced U.S. roles. The wound keeps widening because the wage gap keeps widening.

What Associates Can Do to Apply Pressure and Slow the Bleeding
These aren’t magic bullets — but they are the only levers that have ever moved banks to action.

1. Document the Operational Damage
Offshoring creates errors, delays, compliance gaps, and client escalations. Document them. Quantify them. Escalate them. Executives only respond when risk and client impact outweigh cost savings.
2. Push Issues Through Risk, Audit, and Compliance
These groups have veto power. If offshoring introduces control failures, missed SLAs, or regulatory exposure, file formal issues. Cost cutting collapses fast when regulators start sniffing around.
3. Use Employee Resource Groups & HR Channels Strategically
Not for “feelings.” For retention risk, skill loss, and operational continuity. Frame it as a business problem, not a morale problem.
4. Organize Cross Team Feedback
Executives ignore individuals. They don’t ignore coordinated feedback from multiple teams showing the same failures.
5. Update Your Resume — Quietly
The wage gap (India tech ~$10–20K vs. NYC/NJ ~$110–150K) isn’t going away. BNY’s direction is clear. Your career mobility should be too.

They keep milking the cash cow. Training budgets slashed , only new employees are allowed to attend now. Oil changes at 7500 miles . Credit card $ charges limited. No safety meeting meals. When will it ever stop ?

Two Centenes showed up today.

At Deutsche Bank, the investor story was margin recovery: fewer Medicaid members, a major Florida contract exit, Medicare Advantage still working toward break-even, and hundreds of millions in severance, contract-exit, and third-party “optimization” costs excluded from adjusted SG&A.

Then Centene’s Chief Health Officer posted about a fellowship built around challenging assumptions, cross-sector partnership, affordability, access, and improving outcomes for the communities Centene serves.

Neither message is false. That is what makes the split-screen so effective.

One audience gets the carefully curated story of what can be shed, repriced, exited, or adjusted to make the numbers work. The other gets the mission story about what healthcare should become.

At Centene, “challenging assumptions” appears to mean asking everyone except leadership to accept theirs.

Centene gave the Deutsche Bank crowd a perfectly respectable update today: guidance holds, Q3 trends look like Q2, Medicaid margins are positive, and the turnaround is on track. All true.

But it was also a remarkably selective story.

The same update includes Medicaid membership falling about 9% this year; management estimating 25%–40% of expansion members could eventually become ineligible under work requirements; a Florida behavioral-health exit worth roughly $1.5 billion in revenue per quarter; and Medicare Advantage aiming for growth break-even or better in 2027. The remaining Medicaid population gets sicker as less-expensive members fall away, so the whole thing depends on rates arriving on time, medical-trend initiatives working, and states doing what they are supposed to do. They said as much. “Blocking and tackling” is executive-speak for there is no margin for another miss.

Then there is the scorecard. Centene’s adjusted SG&A excludes $355M–$405M in severance and contract-exit costs, plus $85M–$115M in third-party “optimization” costs. That does not make the recovery fake. It does make the victory lap awfully curated. The cost of making the company smaller is real, even when it is parked below the adjusted line.

So no, this is not really a growth story. It is a margin-recovery story built around fewer members, fewer contracts, fewer internal costs, more repricing, and a much narrower definition of success. Wall Street may love it. It may even work. But at some point, somebody should ask what is left after every non-profitable thing has been exited, every role has been optimized, and the members who remain cost more to serve.

At Deutsche Bank, Centene’s C-suite did not explain the turnaround. They curated the acceptable nouns: fewer members became “attrition,” contract exits became “discipline,” and the cost of putting people and vendors through “optimization” became an adjustment.

Remember “Candid conversations with care?” It would appear that was just another platitude.

It is a very polished story. It is not the whole one. Cute is not the same as candid.

• Wells Fargo & Co. Chief Financial Officer Michael Santomassimo said that the lender’s net interest margin is expected to be better than initially expected.

Coming into the quarter, Santomassimo said executives thought the margin would be down three or four basis points. Now, the measure is likely to be down one basis point or potentially even flat, he said Tuesday at a Barclays Plc conference.*

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-15/wells-fargo-cfo-points-to-better-than-expected-interest-margin

... but we will still ✂️ people to improve our efficiency ratio. The target is below 60% for the full year.

Shoutout to whoever thought about having a company wide broadcast about leaning into Agentic AI that can do a lot of the workload. Even more so for doing it just days after announcing major cost cutting moves. This company really doesn’t have any sense of its employees sentiment right now.

The drastic cuts
Restructured comp plans
Hold-out on commission payouts.
Gunning for EPS and headlines.

NVIDIA would never move to reduce its revenue-per-head (RPH). Our executives should not be offended. It’s not practical to compare Dell RPH to NVIDIA. Server production (and rest of Dell portfolio) in a predominantly direct-sales model will always yield higher operational cost than chip manufacturing in an alliance/OEM model.

MD should be proud of the massive company and portfolio of products he built. Dell ranks only slightly below median RPH compared to similar businesses.

The long-term strategy (and legacy) would be to treat employees well. Don’t go down like this MD.

The City of Aurora is addressing a projected $20 million budget deficit for the upcoming year. Proposed measures include $10.2 million in cuts, achieved through five unpaid furlough days for employees and the elimination of nine unfilled positions. City officials stated that no current employees will be laid off. Aurora possesses $7.3 million in reserve funds to help mitigate the shortfall. The budget is expected to be finalized by December.

Aurora, Colorado

https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/aurora-plans-furlough-days-budget-cuts-shortfall/

Layoffs will be after the next backbook migration waves which are scheduled October 12-21. Layoffs will come after that before Oct 31.

This will also allow employees to stay on payroll for 2 months which ends before the new fiscal year so they can clean up expenses before next year

I thought that's one of the main reasons for cuts: show investors that you're cutting costs, insuring more profit in the future. So what went wrong? Are layoffs suddenly no longer the magic move that fixes everything for those on top?

On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate our workplace culture in terms of toxicity?
(1 = not toxic at all, 10 = extremely toxic)

For those who’ve been around long enough to see BD at its best, do you think a change in leadership could bring those good days back? Does anyone think the incoming CXO can shake things up, cut unnecessary VP positions, save money, and get this organization functioning again?

CDW acquire Lovelytics for $525M. Messaging from leadership “Layoffs are a result of cost cutting measures. We are extremely sorry.” Many talented individuals are given walking papers, some had been with CDW for 10, 20 and 30 years. These individuals are what made CDW, they made it better, they created the culture that made everyone better. It’s all gone :-(

During his fireside chat at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference on September 9, 2026, Dan Schulman explicitly highlighted that these cuts are not a single-year exercise, seeing substantial continued runway for additional efficiency gains into 2027 and 2028.

The Miami Herald has laid off 30 employees as part of broader cost-cutting measures by McClatchy Media. Among those affected was Greg Cote, a sports reporter who had been with the newspaper for 54 years. Cote announced his departure on social media, noting it occurred on his birthday. His colleagues on The Dan Le Batard Show shared the news in a lighthearted video. Cote plans to discuss the details of his layoff on his podcast.

Miami, Florida

https://awfulannouncing.com/newspapers/greg-cote-miami-herald-laid-off-dan-le-batard.html

https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/lr4q3x1fx

Let's also close all non-customer-facing office locations. Real estate will always be more expensive than a VPN. If we weren't spending hundreds of millions on vanity office spaces that need maintenance, infrastructure, furniture, lighting, security, etc.

If this company actually cared about efficiency it would go full virtual. Nobody cares about seeing "Wells Fargo" on a block of concrete when there's no ATM there.

Anybody else getting distinct whiff of ammonia that indicates rising panic among the T2’s ?
Customer feedback must be brutal.

The long credit-card binge bill of leaner-faster-cheaper-ship at all cost ….
must be finally coming due.

OC stoping dragging your foot. While you are at it, please make another attempt at spans and layers. No one really is managing much 3-4 direct reports.

Amid Intel cutting back on open-source projects over the past two years as cost cutting measures at the company, their latest open-source project on the chopping block was the peculiar font they developed a few years back. The project was archived this week only to change course two days later.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-One-Mono-Saved

Love that we're a billion dollar company but can't afford to send electric jacks in each trailer so that my coworkers and I can break our backs hauling your cr-ppy built pallets by hand.

Oracle Reportedly Expands Restructuring Plan by $700M As AI Data Center Costs Mount

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/technology/ai/articles/oracle-reportedly-expands-restructuring-plan-233330514.html

The title says it all.

Gartner predicts that by 2029, one-third of positions eliminated due to AI-related layoffs will be refilled. This suggests that many companies made premature and excessive workforce reductions. The research indicates that these cuts deplete talent and institutional knowledge, leading to higher recruitment and training costs. Organizations prioritizing cost savings from AI risk being outpaced by those reinvesting in innovation and upskilling. Many executives are reportedly using AI as a pretext for budget-driven layoffs.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/4220413/layoff-remorse-gartner-says-at-least-one-in-three-positions-eliminated-by-ai-will-be-restored-by-2029-at-a-higher-cost.html

Curious if anyone here has been through a round of layoffs and can share how it actually played out. When companies say it's "cost cutting" or "moving jobs offshore" — is it usually the entire team/department that goes, or do they pick people out individually?

Also wondering if performance ratings really matter here, or if it's more about tenure, pay level, and role redundancy. Trying to get a realistic picture rather than just guessing.

Ohhhh, I have feedback. 😂 The biggest thing I heard was that Mission Simplify is no longer corporate fluff—it is explicitly Centene’s operating strategy for the next several years. Sarah could not have been clearer: “It is THE strategy.” And despite insisting “this is not a cost-cutting effort,” Drew immediately followed with the financial objective of roughly doubling retained margin from ~1.5¢ to ~3¢ per dollar, while Sarah described consolidating platforms, automating processes, and replacing portions of human interaction with AI. Those things can simultaneously improve operations and reduce costs, but pretending workforce/cost reduction isn't part of the economic consequence is doing a lot of rhetorical work—especially days after thousands of people disappeared from the organization.

The other thing that struck me is that there actually is a coherent strategy underneath the corporate language. Consolidate the ridiculous number of systems, fix data movement, use prevention to avoid expensive acute care, focus Centene on Medicaid/Medicare/Individual, and use automation where repetitive administrative work is consuming money. Rajeev's heart-failure example was probably the clearest explanation of the entire town hall: spend comparatively little controlling hypertension and coordinating care rather than $10–12K when someone lands in the hospital. That is the dual mandate in a way that makes sense. But from where I'm sitting, Mission Simplify is basically describing the exact dysfunction employees have been dealing with every day: systems that don't agree, broken handoffs, manual reports, duplicated work, and employees compensating for architecture failures. Leadership now appears to recognize the same problem we've been living inside.

What bothered me most was the repeated framing around “the extra dollar matters to the Medicaid mom.” I understand the responsibility to be a good steward of taxpayer dollars. I understand that preventing a hospitalization is better for both the member and the system. But I'm also an employee of this healthcare company who cannot afford its healthcare coverage for my own child, so my child is on Medicaid. I am the Medicaid mom they're talking about. It is incredibly difficult to hear leadership invoke people like me as the moral justification for extracting additional savings while some of the company's lowest-paid employees are struggling to afford the benefits the company itself provides. If those savings genuinely improve member outcomes, demonstrate it. Don't use vulnerable members as rhetorical cover for margin expansion.

And then, almost immediately after the Town Hall, Dan Clark sent an organizational-change announcement explicitly tying Medicare restructuring to Mission Simplify. Teams are already being moved, functions consolidated, ownership reassigned, and employees told to remain flexible through the transition. So when Sarah said implementation was beginning, she wasn't talking about something coming six months from now. It's already happening. That makes the insistence that Mission Simplify isn't a cost-cutting exercise even harder to separate from what employees are actually experiencing: layoffs, reorganizations, automation, consolidation, increased workloads for survivors, and now a stated goal of substantially increasing retained margin.

So my takeaway as an employee is complicated. I actually believe parts of the strategy are necessary. Centene desperately needs simpler systems, reliable data, fewer handoffs, better preventive care, and technology that eliminates pointless administrative work. But employees have every reason to be skeptical about who ultimately receives the benefit of those efficiencies. If Mission Simplify means better outcomes for members and better tools and sustainable workloads for employees, great. If it means fewer employees doing more work while the savings are celebrated as improved margins, then calling it anything other than cost cutting won't change what it feels like from this side of the screen.

Jaguar Land Rover will eliminate approximately 4,000 positions over the next two years to reduce costs. This significant restructuring aims to save £1.7 billion and address challenges including weaker sales, tariffs, and competition. The company is targeting voluntary redundancies primarily among salaried and management staff. Despite these cuts, JLR intends to invest heavily in future technologies like electrification and digital advancements. The automotive industry faces rapid technological shifts and intense global competition.

Coventry, United Kingdom

https://coinpaper.com/35505/jaguar-land-rover-layoff

When management is asked about radical operational changes and how it will affect the future of those people and they respond "I don't know", they absolutely DO know and it's time to get out now and let it die. 3+ years of 1% raises is ridiculous. I've given three decades to this business and I'm done. Time to go be part of some mindless industrial machine and make WAY better money. Journalism is dead. Local media is dead. Until a station is run by a single employee, Nexstar will cut and cut until that one person is then running two or three stations. Maybe a 1% raise if they're lucky.

This was really a tone deaf abstract town hall that didn't address how this new mission will affect the employees. This will take years but there's no mention of how much they are going to cut costs. AI will take our jobs at an even greater level.