Monday.com cut 630 jobs on Wednesday 22 July, about 20% of its workforce and roughly 350 of them in Israel, booking $45 million to $55 million in restructuring charges1. Co-founder Eran Zinman told staff in writing that the cut "was not made to reduce costs or replace people with AI". The trade press counted it as an AI layoff anyway, including in a running list of 2026 AI layoffs published three days later by the same outlet that carried Zinman's denial.
Zalando is closing its Erfurt logistics centre by the end of September, ending 2,100 jobs, 1,800 of them permanent2. An arbitration award on 9 July sealed the social plan after management and the works council failed to agree, and the German retailer has provisioned about €80 million, €30 million of that for the Sozialplan, the negotiated package of severance and transition measures German works councils bargain for. No transfer company has been set up. Zalando's stated reason is network realignment after buying About You, plus a new site at Giessen. A German employer shedding that many jobs had the AI framing available this fortnight and did not reach for it.
One figure we relayed did not survive checking. A cumulative tally of 101,743 AI-attributed job cuts circulated in German-language business press on 21 July and read, at a glance, as a German total. It belongs to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the American outplacement firm, and counts cumulative United States cuts through June, from the same series that produced 45,849 US cuts in June alone. Every company named behind it is American3. We are not running it as a German number, and no German equivalent exists.
The direction of attribution has flipped over eight weeks. MIT Sloan's Paul Osterman called AI attribution a cover story for cuts already planned, Microsoft's 4,800 July cuts came with an explicit denial that AI had replaced anyone, and Ford rehired engineers while IBM pledged to triple entry-level hiring after cuts went too far. Employers now deny the label. The press applies it for them.
