Alphabet,
the
parent company of Google, has
announced it will lay off about 6
percent of its global workforce.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai sent his
employees a letter
warning
of
imminent layoffs and saying how
“deeply sorry” he was. He offered
for workers to “feel free to work
from home” for the day in order to
process the tough news that about
12,000 of them would soon lose
their jobs.
This
was
roughly the same number of new
employees that Alphabet lured to
join its workforce last quarter.
According to Investor’s
Business
Daily,
the company “added 12,765
employees, which was above Wall
Street estimates.”
Pichai
was frank about why he had to fire so many
people. He admitted in his letter that the
company had a “huge opportunity” thanks in
part to Google’s “early investments in
AI,” and that to “fully capture” this
opportunity, he would “need to make tough
choices” such as cutting 12,000 jobs.
Surely his laid-off employees could
understand?
Wall
Street
thanked Pichai for his
ruthlessness, with CNBC
reporting
that
“Google
shares were up more than 5 percent
in early trading after the news”
of layoffs.
It’s
a
familiar story elsewhere in the
technology industry—once
considered the most lucrative
sector for secure and well-paid
employment. Microsoft
plans
to
cut 10,000 jobs. Amazon
will
ax
more than 18,000 workers. Meta,
Facebook’s parent company, fired
11,000 workers last November. And,
Twitter
will
be
firing even more workers than the
number initially laid off when
Elon Musk first took over the
company in 2022.
In
response,
stock values are rising. Wedbush
Securities,
a top investment firm, predicts a
20 percent boost in tech share
values this year alone, directly
as a result of job cuts.
Les
Leopold,
executive director of the Labor
Institute
in New York,
wrote in an op-ed
in
the
Los Angeles Times about the
“long-term social devastation”
that arises from mass layoffs,
citing research about worsened
health impacts, psychological
trauma, and even an increase in
suicides.
For
decades,
Americans have been sold the lie
that stock values are an indicator
of economic wellness. The popular
syndicated radio program Marketplace
every
day
dutifully airs the values of the
Dow Jones, the Nasdaq, and the
S&P 500 indexes down to the
fraction, and plays
correspondingly happy, sad, or
ambivalent music. The music makes
it clear that society ought to
celebrate when numbers are higher
than the day before, and mourn
when the numbers fall. In other
words, Marketplace is indirectly
urging us to be happy about
thousands of people losing their
livelihoods.
There is
a high likelihood that some people among
the tens of thousands who are losing their
jobs in the tech sector will kill
themselves in response.
But we
are supposed to celebrate because stock
values are rising.
Among
those
whose future is now suddenly
tenuous are untold numbers of immigrant
workers,
lured to the U.S. by tech
companies on H-1B visas. We don’t
know how many foreign workers are
impacted because, according to the
New
York
Times,
“employers have not disclosed how
many workers on temporary visas
have been let go.”
Asians,
and
Indians in particular, are
disproportionately part of the
tech workforce in California’s
Silicon Valley. According to the
Silicon Valley Institute for
Regional Studies, an analysis of
the latest U.S. census numbers
finds that Indian
nationals
comprise more than
one-quarter
of
all
college-educated residents of
Santa Clara and San Mateo counties
who are employed by technology
firms.
Their
immigration
status is tied to their jobs by
the H-1B visas on which they
likely arrived in the nation. Now,
if they are among the unlucky ones
facing unemployment, they have only
two
months
to
find
new employment—or risk overstaying
their visas.
What
does
the American economic punditry
have to say in response to the
social devastation of mass
layoffs? One Harvard
Business
Review
writer
advises
newly unemployed tech workers to
“reconfigure your mindset,” and
create a “job-hunting schedule.”
Perhaps there should have been one
more suggestion: “try not to kill
yourself as you face the grim
prospect of leaving a country you
think of as home.”
Another
adviser,
also writing in Harvard
Business
Review,
offers ways of “managing your
emotions after being laid off,”
which includes the suggestion:
“consider starting a side hustle.”
But
only
a few months ago, Americans were
being told that the “labor market”
was “tight,”
or
“hot”
(which
is
economist-speak for plentiful jobs
and not enough workers), as well
being warned that inflation
could
result.
There was rampant speculation that
this meant workers had more leverage
and
that
they could use it to bargain
for
higher wages.
Now, with massive layoffs in at
least one major
industry—technology—which is seen
as central
to
the
economy as a whole, will the labor
market “cool”? It’s hard to say.
Workers are expected to live (or
die) at the whim of the market.
If the
purpose of an economic system is to ensure
the well-being of the people within that
system, then the U.S. economy appears to
be doing the opposite, lamenting worker
leverage and wage growth, and celebrating
layoffs. In other words, the values of our
economic system are antithetical to human
well-being.
We don’t
have to accept such a dehumanizing
economy.
Congress
could
pass a bill
eliminating
per-country
limits on employment-based visas
and other obstacles for permanent
residency applications so that
foreign workers whose lives are
upended by a fickle economy have
leverage to remain in the U.S. if
they wish.
We
could
do what people in other countries
do. For example, in France, more
than a million people are on
strike
to
protest
the government’s proposal to raise
the retirement age. They have
brought the country to a complete
standstill, making it clear that
the economy works for them, not
the other way around.
Similarly,
in
Spain, striking
taxi
workers
are
making
it clear that there will be no
business as usual if their
well-being is eroded. In the UK,
where a new conservative
government is trying to dilute the
power of workers to strike,
thousands of people marched in
protest under the banner of “Enough
Is
Enough.”
Replicating
this
in the U.S. means increasing union
membership dramatically. The U.S.
Bureau
of Labor Statistics
released
a
recent report finding that in
spite of strong union activity in
the past year, and a pro-labor
president, unionization levels
fell to a record low, largely
because most new jobs being added
are nonunion. Greater levels of
union membership would mean
greater job security and greater
pressure on the economy to ensure
worker rights.
Another
option,
especially to counter massive
layoffs, is to demand that the
government step in to employ the
jobless. A new campaign led by 10
economic justice organizations
called Full
Employment
for All
calls
for
a “targeted federal program for
subsidized employment” that “could
create jobs and economic growth.”
The
campaign is inspired by the ideas of Rev.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who gave his
famous “I Have a Dream” speech 60 years
ago this year at the March on Washington
for Jobs and Freedom. Note that the word
“jobs” came before “freedom” in the title
of the march. The demands of the march
included “[a] massive federal program to
train and place all unemployed
workers—Negro and white—on meaningful and
dignified jobs at decent wages.”
We
don’t
have to accept layoffs as the
price of economic growth. Instead
of “reconfiguring
our
mindset”
in
searching
for new jobs, we could demand a
new economy that works for us.
This
commentary
was
produced
by Economy
for
All,
a project of the Independent Media
Institute.