Fifteen events. Every number wears its class.
In fifteen months, fifteen companies — from Intel and Amazon to Nike and FedEx — filed or announced the workforce reductions on this ledger: 115,875 tracked job cuts, plus two filed restructurings that never disclosed a number. The deeper finding is about the numbers themselves: only about a third of those heads trace to a count a company actually put in a filing. This report grades every number by where it comes from — and every figure on this page is computed from the ledger at render time.
published 2026-08-27 · data cutoff 2026-08-26 · edition 2 — supersedes 2026-08-26 ed.1 (ledger 8 → 15; published before the edition archive existed and not preserved — said plainly) · updated only by a new dated edition
Fifteen months of cuts, one picture.
Every event on the ledger, on the calendar it was announced. Bubble area is headcount; color is the receipt class — where the number actually comes from. The legend is also the control: switch classes off to see what survives on filings alone. Dashed hollow marks are companies that filed a restructuring and never disclosed a count — absence drawn as absence, never as zero.
Where the numbers come from.
The same 115,875 heads, decomposed by the quality of their receipt. The filed-verbatim rows are the floor you can defend in any room — a number the company itself signed in a filing. Everything above that floor inherits the class of its weakest link.
The wave, accumulating.
Read cumulatively, the ledger shows two waves. 2025 was four events, three of them giants — Intel, Amazon and HP stacked 60,400 tracked heads inside four months; CrowdStrike’s 500 is the fourth. 2026 is many more companies cutting less each: eleven events across six industries, six of them in the first quarter alone. The wave did not grow taller — it grew wider.
The giants trim. The mid-caps amputate.
A headcount says how big a cut is; the share of workforce says how deep it goes. WiseTech's 2,000 is a stated 30% of WiseTech — while some of the ledger's biggest headcounts state no share at all. Where companies stated the share, this exhibit draws both dimensions at once; where they didn't, the row says so instead of computing one from a denominator the company never gave.
Announced is not effective.
Between the press release and the last day there is a window in which a headline is true but nothing has happened yet. For same-day filings that window is zero; for HP it is nearly three years. Reading layoff totals as if announcement equaled effect compresses years of the labor market into one news cycle.
All fifteen, every field.
The record behind every exhibit above — one row per event, receipt class printed on each. The estimated-payroll column is the desk's estimate and is labeled as one. This table is deliberately the last view: a table is the record, not the story.
What this is, and what it refuses to do.
The data: a curated ledger. Every event enters with a receipt — an SEC filing (8-K, 10-Q, 10-K), a regulatory release, or reputable press — and the receipt is graded by class, printed on every exhibit. We read the filings first, fetched from SEC EDGAR with a declared research agent; the exact filed sentence governs. The discipline: we never create a number. No share of workforce is computed from an assumed headcount; no undisclosed count is estimated; null is never rendered as zero; the largest figure in the ledger is labeled as the derivation it is (Intel's 26,400 — press-derived from a filed target of "about 75,000" core employees, attrition included). The limit that matters most: whether any of these cuts is attributable to AI is an editorial judgment, not a data operation — and it has not been made yet.