Over 85,000 tech workers have been laid off since the beginning of 2023, demonstrating the urgency of worker organizing.
In January, amid mass layoffs across the tech industry, Google laid off 6 percent of its workforce, or about 12,000 workers. In protest, dozens of tech workers crowded the sidewalk outside of Google’s Chelsea offices on February 2, sharing stories of laid-off coworkers and urging each other to join the union. The protest took place while executives at Alphabet (Google’s parent company) were on an earnings call with investors, announcing billions in profits.
The workers highlighted the cruelty of how workers were told they’d lost their jobs. One anonymous worker shared that they were laid off via email while eating breakfast in the office. Another worker, who is three months pregnant, shared that because of the conditions of her severance, she is barred from accepting roles or income until April 28, when she’ll be six months pregnant, and is worried that even if she gets a new job that day, she won’t qualify for parental leave so soon at a new company. Her severance will run out before her due date, leaving her without another paycheck until months after her baby is born.
Over 85,000 tech workers have been laid off since the beginning of 2023, by companies including Meta (13 percent of employees laid off), Lyft (15 percent), DoorDash (6 percent), Spotify (6 percent), and Microsoft (5 percent). These numbers don’t include contracted employees, who often work overseas and are more likely to have been getting paid much less (with much worse benefits) than full-time employees to begin with; if these tech companies decide not to renew their contracts, these workers are also effectively laid off, even if they aren’t included in these official numbers. Also unreported are the number of laid-off workers who were on work visas and who have not only lost their income but must now race against the clock to find another visa-sponsoring job or else face the threat of deportation.
According to executives, these layoffs result from “overstaffing” or represent necessary cost-cutting in the face of a looming recession. Most of these companies, however, are profitable or sitting on enormous piles of cash. Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta pulled in billions in profits last quarter alone. Google, as one worker at the rally pointed out, made $17 billion in profits in the third quarter of 2022, and it expected similar results in Q4. And as any tech worker will tell you if they were at a company that has gone through layoffs, these companies are not “overstaffed”; some workers left behind are now being asked to do the work of two or three people to keep productivity as high as it was before they lost thousands of coworkers. As one Google software engineer put it, “if executives tell you that layoffs had to happen at google, they are lying.”
Why Are Tech Layoffs Happening?
For the past decade and a half, tech workers in high demand in a tight labor market have commanded high salaries and benefits, and they have been assured some measure of job security. Tech companies that wanted to hire scarce and in-demand tech workers had no choice but to compete with each other, offering higher and higher salaries and cushier perks to attract them. In the eyes of tech executives, this has gone on for far too long.

Truthout

Tags：Punish Workers