AI Blamed for U.S. Layoffs While Iran's Internet Blackout Destroys Jobs Abroad — Two Very Different Workforce Crises

Iran: When the Government Kills Your Industry

In mid-March, a 49-year-old product designer named Babak — who asked to be identified only by his first name for safety reasons — was called into his boss's office at a Tehran tech company and told his position was gone. According to the New York Times, Iran's government had shut down the internet roughly two weeks earlier, at the start of U.S.-Israeli military operations against the country.

No internet. No job.

Babak told the Times via voice message: "Throughout my career, I have worked hard, continuously learned, and tried to grow." Didn't matter. When a government decides to go dark, entire industries go with it.

This is what authoritarian control looks like in practice. The Iranian regime, facing military pressure, shut off the digital infrastructure its own private sector depends on. Businesses buckled. Workers got pink slips. The government that caused the collapse bears zero accountability to the people it just put out of work.

This isn't a market failure. This is what happens when the state owns the off switch.

Mainstream coverage has focused heavily on the geopolitical drama — U.S. and Israeli strikes, Iranian retaliation, nuclear negotiations. The human economic wreckage inside Iran barely registers. Regular Iranians losing careers they spent decades building? That's page-four material, apparently.

America: AI Is the New Excuse

Back in the United States, a completely different dynamic is playing out — but the end result for workers looks eerily similar.

According to an analysis cited by The Hill, U.S.-based employers have named artificial intelligence as the top stated reason for job cuts for the second consecutive month. That's a trend.

The Hill's report doesn't sugarcoat it: companies are increasingly using AI as the public justification for layoffs. Whether that's entirely honest is a separate question. AI is real, its productivity gains are real — but "AI made us do it" is also a convenient cover for cost-cutting that executives were already planning.

The coverage tends to blur the difference between AI replacing jobs and AI being blamed for job cuts that would have happened anyway. Shareholders want leaner operations. AI gives the boardroom a socially acceptable narrative. "We had to modernize" sounds better than "we wanted to boost our margin."

That said, the real disruption is legitimate. AI is changing what skills pay. Roles built around repetitive cognitive tasks — data entry, basic coding, content templating, customer service scripting — are being automated faster than most people anticipated two years ago.

The workers being displaced aren't lazy. Many of them, like Babak in Tehran, did everything right. They learned, they grew, they showed up. The market shifted under them.

The Real Story Nobody's Connecting

Neither the Times nor The Hill has drawn a straight comparison of why these crises are happening — and what that tells us about the systems workers are operating in.

In Iran, jobs are disappearing because a theocratic government made a unilateral decision that destroyed private sector infrastructure. The workers had no vote, no recourse, no market signal to respond to. It just happened.

In America, jobs are disappearing because companies are adopting technology that increases output per worker — which, in a free market, is supposed to be a good thing long-term, even if it's brutal short-term. Workers here have options the Iranian tech employee does NOT: retraining programs, a functioning job market, the ability to start a competing business, legal protection, and a government that isn't actively torching their livelihood.

A market disruption and a government-imposed blackout are not morally equivalent events. One is painful evolution. The other is authoritarian destruction.

What Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud

On the AI front, the policy conversation in Washington is embarrassingly thin. Congress has held endless hearings where senators ask Mark Zuckerberg what Facebook is. Meanwhile, AI is reshaping labor markets in real time and there is no serious federal framework for workforce transition — not from Democrats, not from Republicans.

That's a bipartisan failure.

On Iran, the economic suffering of ordinary citizens is a direct consequence of a regime that treats its population as hostages to its own geopolitical agenda. The people being laid off in Tehran didn't choose to be in a war. They didn't vote for a government that shuts off the internet. They're collateral damage of a theocracy's choices.

Sanctions hawks in Washington like to argue that economic pain will eventually force regime change from within. But the workers sending voice messages to journalists while unemployed aren't the ones making policy decisions in Tehran.

In Closing

Two very different forces — AI adoption and government authoritarianism — are wiping out jobs on two continents. American workers facing AI disruption at least have a fighting chance to adapt. Iranian workers are at the mercy of a government that can erase their entire industry with a switch.

Free markets with real disruption. Or authoritarian control with zero accountability.