You know the economy is wobbling when companies start getting creative with the language of layoffs. And right now, the corporate thesaurus is working overtime. In the past week alone, Amazon, Target, Paramount, and CBS have all made headlines for mass layoffs. Add to that YouTube, which is now quietly offering “voluntary exit packages” to employees—essentially the soft-focus Instagram filter version of being laid off.
But let’s not pretend this is new. Companies have long used euphemisms like “restructuring,” “workforce optimization,” and “strategic resizing” to soften the blow of job cuts. What is new is the tone. Now it’s not just a layoff—it’s an “opt-in separation,” a “voluntary transition,” a “career choice.” As though workers are simply waking up one morning and thinking, You know what? I would love to choose unemployment today.
These programs are buyouts. They always have been. But framing them as “voluntary” conveniently shifts the emotional weight onto employees themselves. As Holly Howard, a business culture consultant, puts it, this is “psychological and emotional outsourcing.” Management avoids the messy narrative of layoffs by allowing workers to select which exit door they walk through—while signaling to everyone who stays that the floor may soon give way beneath them.
To some employees, these packages can be genuinely useful. If you’re close to retirement, already planning to move on, or blessed with a fresh job offer in hand, a few months’ severance and extended healthcare can feel like a gift. But for everyone else, the message is clear: Take the buyout now, or risk being pushed out later—with fewer benefits and more bitterness.
Workers know this game. As one person on Reddit put it, “Anytime a company offers this, I’ve learned to take it.” They described staying once the “voluntary” round ended—only to endure rolling layoffs with no severance and an increasingly toxic workplace. It’s not loyalty at that point. It’s fear.
And fear is growing. More than one in four unemployed workers today has been out of a job for six months or more. That’s a level historically associated with recession-level conditions. Whether economists want to call it a downturn or not, workers are experiencing one.
So yes—voluntary layoffs may look gentle, even generous. But they are still layoffs. The same number of people end up out of work. The same number of livelihoods are disrupted. The same economic insecurity spreads.
“Voluntary” is just the PR gloss. Rearranging the deck chairs still doesn’t stop the ship from sinking.