by Optimum
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Two stories crossed my desk this month that had nothing to do with each other on paper. Uber is cutting 23% of its People and Places division. And early childhood educators across Australia are voting to walk off the job over pay they’d already been promised. Different industries, different pay brackets, different countries even. Same root problem: businesses keep quietly hollowing out the people who hold everything together, then acting surprised when it all starts to wobble.
HR is cutting HR. Read that again.
Uber isn’t cutting sales. Uber isn’t cutting engineering. Uber is cutting the division that covers HR, recruitment, workplace and culture, by nearly a quarter. Bolt’s CEO didn’t just downsize his HR team, he eliminated the whole department and posted about it like it was a personal win. IBM has quietly replaced roughly 200 HR roles with AI agents while it talks up hiring elsewhere in the business.
Globally, 87% of HR leaders say they’ve already run layoffs this year or have them planned, and 78% now describe layoffs as a “regular” event rather than a one-off correction. The function that’s meant to manage restructures, protect the workforce and hold leadership accountable to it, is now the one getting restructured. When the department built to advocate for people becomes the easiest line item to cut, that tells you exactly how much weight “we value our people” carries on a balance sheet.
Locally, it’s a quieter version of the same thing. 268,000 Australians were made redundant in 2025, the highest number since the post-pandemic rebound, and 19% of employers are still expecting more cuts heading into this quarter. Most of it isn’t headline-grabbing mass layoffs. It’s roles frozen, headcount quietly paused, three jobs folded into one salary. No announcement. No new title. Just more on fewer plates.
Meanwhile, the people actually doing the caring are burning out and leaving
Early childhood education is the sharpest example of what happens when a workforce gets squeezed from every direction at once. Nearly 1,200 educators surveyed by the AEU, and about half are frequently thinking about walking away. Of the centres surveyed, 95% had staff leave in the last twelve months, and 78% of those lost more than three educators. The sector needs 21,000 more qualified people just to meet current demand, and it can’t hold onto the ones it already has.
Here’s the bit that should sting a bit more than it does. A childcare worker on award minimum takes home around $58,000 a year doing genuinely skilled, physically and emotionally demanding work, often with an unpaid day’s worth of admin buried in there somewhere. A warehouse associate at Amazon earns a comparable amount, sometimes more, for work that clocks off when the shift ends and doesn’t follow you home. One educator put it better than I could: “You are paid more working in a warehouse and the workload and responsibility are nowhere near as intense.” That’s not someone giving up on a vocation. That’s someone doing the maths.
It nearly boiled over properly this month too. Educators across the country had voted for a national walk-off on 15 July over a pay rise the government hadn’t locked in past this year. It only got called off because Canberra found $3.6 billion to extend it by eighteen months. Eighteen months. Not a permanent fix, a pause on the argument.
The pattern underneath both
Strip away the industries and you’re left with the same decision playing out twice. Somewhere, someone looked at the cost of the people who do the human, hard-to-quantify work, the ones managing culture, wellbeing, care, retention, whatever you want to call it, and decided that was the soft spot to press when budgets got tight. Not because that work matters less. Because it’s the work that doesn’t show up cleanly on a P&L until it’s already gone wrong.
You can’t spreadsheet your way out of the cost of losing trust, institutional knowledge or a genuinely good educator who’s just tired. It doesn’t show up until retention tanks, until the good candidates start asking sharper questions in interviews, until an entire cohort of experienced people decides a warehouse shift is the better deal.
What actually needs to happen
If you’re a leader reading this and nodding along about the childcare sector while quietly running the same playbook internally, that’s worth sitting with. The organisations getting through this period without gutting themselves aren’t the ones avoiding restructure altogether. They’re the ones being honest about why it’s happening, protecting the roles that hold the place together, and treating burnout as a cost to the business, not just a wellbeing footnote.
Everyone else is just deferring the bill. And the people footing it are the ones you can least afford to lose.
Stormi Owens, Consultant
