If you work at one of the large tech companies that, in the last few weeks [or months], have laid off thousands of employees, you may be wondering what the hell is going on. Especially if the company you’re working for is not actually struggling economically right now. If you work for Google, say, you must be thinking, “What is it about the coming recession that makes a company that’s doing just fine institute broad layoffs for the first time in its 23-year history?”
The answer, my friend, is class warfare.
I was laid off in March of this year. The company didn’t over hire during COVID. We lost a few people right at the start and slowly hired replacements towards the end. It was completely unexpected. The company was doing great and my team was responsible for maintaining and continuing development of a product that was still making millions. I was laid off with a few other incredibly valuable members of the team, some of which had been with the company long before the team was bought from previous management.
I’ll never understand why it happened, and it was a very stressful time to happen so unexpectedly. Thankfully I recovered and got a pay bump but still, what the fuck.
If your company was publicly traded, the answers may be out there. They are beholden to shareholders and your board of directors.
It’s always something about “improving performance” or “lowering overhead”. The real reason is money. If the company looks like it’s improving the stock value will go up and the right people will make money. An easy way to do that is fire a bunch of underperforming employees before a shareholder meeting. It doesn’t hurt production too much if they’re underperforming compared to the average employee and it doesn’t require a large capital spending plan to improve things.
Of course ‘looks like it is improving’ and ‘underperformed employees’ tend to be abstract numbers on spreadsheets that only exist to increase short term stocks. Productions in general doesn’t fall off for some time even if you fire the best employees, so anything below that will prop up the company while it coasts for a few quarters before the wealthy that know start dumping the stocks.
