Is A Cruelty Crisis Sweeping Corporate America?

Last week, Target announced it would eliminate about 1,800 corporate roles — roughly 1,000 layoffs plus 800 unfilled positions. At first glance, it might seem like business as usual in a week filled with headlines about sweeping job cuts at companies like Amazon and UPS.

But that framing misses the deeper issue. The story is not just the layoffs themselves, but the way they were handled. Target’s choices in how they handled the restructure are symptoms of a troubling pattern: unnecessary cruelty towards employees’ experiences is becoming normalized in corporate America.

1. Timing and prolonged anxiety

Target announced the restructuring on a Thursday, but told employees that individual notices would not arrive until the following Tuesday. Thousands of people were left in limbo for nearly a week, wondering whether their livelihoods were intact. The toll on mental and physical health from that kind of forced uncertainty is profound.

2. The work-from-home directive

Target instructed corporate employees to work from home ahead of the announcement, sparing the company images of staff carrying boxes through Minneapolis skyways. But that choice also stripped away the shared experience of processing bad news with colleagues, forcing workers to absorb life-changing news in isolation.

The irony is stark. Earlier this year, Target insisted that returning to the office was essential for collaboration and culture for many of its employees. Yet at the moment of greatest need, those same employees were told to stay home. The message was unmistakable: in-office culture is a mandate when it serves the company, but dispensable when it might damage the company’s image.

3. Leadership framing without ownership

Executives framed the cuts as necessary to simplify operations and fuel growth. What they did not do was take responsibility for the company’s own missteps — nine of the last eleven quarters showing flat or declining sales, and reputational damage after retreating from earlier diversity and inclusion commitments. Instead, responsibility was shifted onto employees suddenly deemed “duplicative.”

4. The unseen cost: work wounds

Layoffs handled without care don’t just end jobs, they inflict lasting harm. For those who endured days of limbo or received a cold digital notice, the impact extends well beyond a résumé gap.

How people treat one another can lead to what I call work wounds — deep marks of betrayal, burnout, bullying or bad behavior that imprint on the nervous system long after employment ends. They manifest as sleepless nights, health flare-ups, distrust of future employers, and ripple effects that reach families and communities.

The research is clear. A 2025 meta-analysis in Occupational & Environmental Medicine confirmed that unemployment significantly increases the risk of anxiety and depression, with effects that can last for years. The impact also hits the bottom line – Gallup’s most recent wellbeing report found that employees who feel disregarded by leadership disengage at far higher rates, costing companies billions in lost productivity.

Target as case study, not exception

Target is simply this week’s example in a wider crisis. Nearly 1 million U.S. workers have been laid off in 2025 alone, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Layoffs are at their highest level since 2020 and accelerating.

When companies treat employees as disposable, they are not just restructuring operations. They are reshaping human beings, leaving scars that may never fully heal.

This corporate willingness to disregard the human experience is not limited to layoffs. Consider Elon Musk’s recent declaration that “AI and robots will replace all jobs” — delivered without any acknowledgment of how people will survive financially or socially. Work has long provided the backbone for housing, food, health care and dignity. Without it, who will buy the very goods these corporations depend on?

The herd effect 

Research shows that when companies see peers cutting jobs, it creates a herd mentality. As one Stanford review put it, many firms engage in ‘copy-cat layoffs’ and decisions driven not by internal necessity but by what competitors are doing. This groupthink makes harsher actions easier to rationalize, providing cover for companies to treat decisions that many employees will experience as cruel as economic inevitability.

But callous indifference to employees’ experience in how layoffs are handled is not inevitable. It is a choice.

The antidote: courageous leaders

It takes courage for leaders to center the human experience in hard decisions. It takes courage and radical responsibility to ask: What will this feel like for the people impacted? How can we protect dignity, even when reductions are unavoidable? How would I feel if I was in the same position? 

Target’s leadership had options. They could have communicated with transparency, shortened the window of anxiety, and taken public responsibility for missteps. Instead, they implemented a process that maximized distance and ambiguity, which risked causing unnecessary harm.

Do not mistake this for the only way to handle layoffs in 2025. It is not.

If you are a leader facing headwinds, remember: financial decisions ripple far beyond a spreadsheet. They reverberate in the nervous systems of your people. They echo far and wide in homes, schools, and communities.

There is always an opportunity to avoid cruelty by thoroughly considering their experience. There is a way to do what is necessary for the business while honoring the humanity of those affected. It requires more than cost-cutting. 

It requires courage to reject what has become the norm and to act as you would want to be treated if your own job was on the line. In moments of crisis, leaders have a choice: follow the herd into corporate cruelty or take responsibility to lead with courage by centering the human experience.

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Bree Johnson has spent her career helping leaders navigate the hidden costs of burnout, betrayal, and bad behavior at work — what she calls work wounds. She’s the founder of Executive Unschool and writes The Stress Less Newsletter, a weekly reflection on how we can stress less, recover faster, and lead with more courage in uncertain times. Subscribe here to join the conversation.