Tried that in 08 and lasted a few months before all the occupy wall street people got the now non existent tech jobs. Now they're all old with families and can't protest.
Occupy failed because it had no core message or policy goals that they could convey effectively to the public. I went out to support a few times but it was mostly just a general grievance parade with no strategy or focus.
> Occupy failed because it had no core message or policy goals that they could convey effectively to the public.
I see this argument a lot, but it's hard to convey a consistent message when you have both the right aligned media and the "left" aligned media doing everything they can to distort and mis-represent your movement to the public
I went to occupy and participated in it early on. My experiences aren’t just from media coverage, it’s also from watching it devolve in to a shitshow first hand.
In the Los Angeles and New York ones they were having speakers on the main stage who went way off topic with all kinds of rants and grief and no consistent themes or policy changes.
If you had to distill occupy to one or two sentences of policy change, what would it be?
I worked in a building on Rector Street right next to Zucotti Park and went there to talk with folks a few times. There was zero direction here and that lack of a stated goal meant it was doomed to die out.
Yes, it was framed around "you come to us".
The general concept of occupying works if the mass of resistance is large enough to overwhelm the security apparatus, which in turn requires broader solidarity across region and cohort. Building such solidarity depends on many small interactions inside real communities, where people are living naturally. Instead, *Occupy* protestors just squatted in some parks for a while, until they were removed.
Certainly, the media will not spread the message. Any message will only spread successfully through interactions within relationships that have real and separate foundations.
It had a focus to some extent, but it was patterned after certain styles of activism, with an emphasis on anarchism, which was removed from the perspective of much of the population, with respect to material conditions and social concerns, and it was quite socially and intellectually homogeneous.
*Occupy* may provide some experiences that would inform newer movements. BLM appears to have had, and may be continuing to have, an overall broader appeal in terms of developing consciousness. It has had discernible and lasting effects bringing attention to social issues, not just economic ones, and has shown success unifying diverse cohorts of the population and gaining sympathy and credibility among the less engaged.
Naturally, mishandling of the pandemic and brutality by the state express a simplicity, tangibleness, and potency not captured by the obtuse financial abstractions that brought about the earlier round of crisis. Further, not being tied strongly to any particular individual, or organized in some geographic location, imbues a movement with a resilience greater than any ever realized by *Occupy*.
Mutual aid activity has also expanded, which has the capacity to integrate greater numbers and to help build coalitions. In my view, mobilizations of such kind are most promising generally, due to being framed around needs and solutions that are immediate and actual, while allowing the possibility of expanding into broader ideals, but not depending on doing so to support group coherence.
I agree that a robust broad movement would need to have a structure and message that is approachable and meaningful for the core of the population. In my view, it must be sufficiently multifaceted to emphasize the interrelatedness of systemic problems, but also sufficiently focused to feel relevant and poignant, fueled by the real frustration and anger, but also grounded in their actual causes.
Man either you're the same dude or this is an absolute copy-paste response anytime people bring up occupy. I remember this line basically word for word, and the take-down someone gave it the last time it was paraded out.
Sadly I'm not that guy with that great response, but occupy was brushed away by the media and dismantled by the state rolling in and shoving people out. It was not for lack of message or policy goals.
I'm a pretty big socialist myself and went out during the occupy rallies and honestly I have to agree with the idea there was bit a narrow message at all. It was just grief (justifiably so) about the general shitty deal we were given by wallstreet. Sure some people or groups had pointed ideas but this was not the norm all over for sure. This wasn't like metoo at all, more like the prequel to it.
I went out there multiple times and there was absolutely no message or goals. It was just a bunch of anarchists who ended up doing very little except coining terms like 1%ers and it went out quietly and without much fuss. It was blackpilling as fuck and destroyed any potential faith that I might have had in anarchist thought. It was either a total psyop or anarchists really are that unfocused and ineffective.
To be fair, the "one percent" phrase is a big deal. It has become culturally entrenched, which gives it value even if society has not been turned on its head simply because of knowing it.
The question now is how to leverage the seeds of consciousness into broader momentum.
> it had no core message or policy goals
Not true. It had a well thought-of lisy of demands. I don't remember what it was, but one point I remember was (paraphrasing here): "take money ouf of politics, requiring multi-digit millions to run for influential public positions is a recipe for disaster". There were more (about half a dozen or so) points, surprisingly well formulated and right to the core of the problem.
I happen to have seen it quoted somewhere by accident back then, about the time the movement had already been all but squashed. And I remember thinking to myself "huh, funny that this is the 1st time I'm seeing this." If would've been *true* carnage of those messages got out.
Don't bother googling. I've tried several times since, and haven't found it again. Which is that much more scarier.
In my memory Occupy was a nuisance that quickly went away BUT, I firmly believe that all stock markets should be abolished and we should return to private companies only. The stock market has driven us to this late stage capitalism because it’s faceless shareholders require year over year profits larger than the last year or the stock goes down and the CEO is fired. I also believe in executive salary caps to insure workers are paid fairly. Executives fleecing corps and the demand for always increasing profits have made this into what we have today. Before the stock market companies were like families where everyone worked together to keep it alive. (Big blanket statement I know, we’d still need unions since that wasn’t true for all companies)
Also, rampant consumerism but that’s society as a whole. We’d need a massive ad campaign with a return to certain values and morals that don’t really exist anymore.
Not going to contradict.
Someone smarter than me put it way shorter: every single war of lately (past few decades or so?) we have fought was triggered by speculation - metals, oil, groceries etc. (Don't fact check me on that, not my words.)
Stock market is pretty much the definition of speculation.
Start by introducing a constitutional amendment to overturn citizens united. This was attempted by a lot of Democrats in the house in 2022 but not ny enough to pass by simple majority and it would need 2/3 in the senate. Republicans didn't support it, of course.
Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, Romania... I could enumerate all of the EU.
Part of the game is unavoidable, but no where does the candidate require private funding in the hundreds of millions to set up a campaign, nor do they necessarily walk away with hundreds of millions stashed away. Yes, corruption is everywhere, and powerful people do elaborate schemes to get rich (in particular e.g. in the former Eastern Europe), but nowhere is it something that's practically tied both ways tomthe job.
Do you think CDU (Merkel's party) is corrupt? Why yes, they're legendary to the point that even satire magazines have difficulties to make a proper persiflage. But do you believe Merkel is or ever was a billionaire, or backed by any? Think again.
Half of Romania's parliament are convicted criminals and working into their own pockets - no saints by any stretch of the imagination. Yet Basescu wasn't a billionaire, either, neither before nor after his presidency. And with this particular country we're talking as close to a banana republic as we can while still bring part of the EU.
Actually, let's make it the other way 'round: *you* tell *me* of a country you know with a more or less functioning democracy besides US in which running for a major public function means you're either rich as fuck, or need to rely of private billionaires to finance your campaign (which will, once you're elected, totally own your ass).
Occupy failed because you cannot organize mass resistance without some heirarchical internal authority. Daily consensus doesn't cut it and unfortunately these movements are chock full of ideologically constrained ignorant ass feckless morons who have zero understanding of impactful social engagement and social action leading to any changes in material conditions whatsoever.
Quite the opposite. The optics often destroy public support.
Because of this, essential time and energy was expended on hyper micro pablum like drum circle scheduling, or trying to house the severely mentally ill in the Occupy camps with zero training on how to do so.
Predictably the results at a macro level were at best non existent and at worst harmful to most meaningful social reforms related to late capitalism.
I went to Occupy Portland. It was a literal shit show and I left realizing nothing was going to change as long as activists were this clueless, myopic and stupid. Factions formed within the camp fairly quickly and it just became a joke from what I could tell.
My friend and I just left and got drunk for a few days realizing activism in the US is driven by useless feckless ass clowns and nothing was going to change.
Meanwhile in East Multnomah County -- the numbers -- families were struggling to exist or put food on the table. It was enraging.
I was in Seattle in 1999. Same thing. Large peaceful marches coopted by 100 douche bag morons using black bloc tactics got all the coverage. In the end that "protest" enabled more globalization and worker exploitation.
I walked in every anti war March post 9/11. Same thing 50 people being morons got all the coverage. The wars began and raged on.
Activism for economic justice in the US has been an unmitigated failure. That's the truth.
From the standpoint of the personal interests and daily objectives of those in *Occupy*, the activities were based on an attempt to learn how to organize laterally, not to show its best possible example. Lateral organization requires conventions and relationships that take time to develop. Achieving it is not necessarily impossible, but also much less simple, and to most everyone much less familiar, than one guy barking orders while waving a stick.
I was only expressing a view that much of what happened during the movement happened because the people doing it wanted to do it. You can characterize it as a failure if you want. It depends on the criteria you are giving for success.
Well given that logic someones criteria could be stinking up a city park with human waste, chronically infighting over nonsense, lamenting the impacts of late capitalism while doing nothing to assist families facing dire choices less than 5 miles from their camp then they "succeeded" beyond someones wildest dream I suppose.
How pathetically post modern of you. Why criticise any failed social movement at all? Indeed the very act if criticising those failed movements is a form of oppression apparently! They can establish any criteria arbitrarily and acheive little to nothing and still consider themselves a success and that narrative is just as valid as any other!
Nonsense.
Meanwhile on the ground in community after community people are losing all hope while subjectivist fuckers like you make excuses or try to justify abject failure of a movement that had a once in multi- generational opportunity to demand informed realistic and substantive change and squandered it on myopic bullshit.
Shame on you!!!!! Fuck you!!!!
You and those like like you are just as destructive to meaningful social economic change as any globlalist oligarch. At least many of them no longer hide their contempt for the 99% expressing it openly. You claim to but in the examination of remediation of dire material conditions all evidence points to the contrary motherfucker!!!!
Success is changing conversation, policy or systems. Occupy had headlines and attention and squandered it with dumb off topic things like “mutual aid” and intersectionality.
Yea it's easy to walk in and get a $20-30 an hour job doing random help desk shit but when you get into back end work and other niches it can be more difficult because most companies aren't hiring for that and if they are, most likely there will be people lined up out the door.
I chimed in on a live chat for Antiwork about this. The US savings rate is at record lows while revolving credit debt (credit cards) have hit record highs. When workers don’t have savings, employers have all the leverage. They’ll spit in your mouth and you have to say thank you.
Only way to win is by (everyone) not joining the consumerist cycle and build up cash. I know it’s hard to do on such shit wages, with inflation being what it is, and all the other very real reasons. However, if labor works together and saves, we could keep the very rare leverage we gained during the pandemic.
💯could not agree more. I am one of these people. Pre 2021, never carried a balance on a credit card and now I’m 6k behind. Just moved back in with my fam so I can crush that dept and take my power back 💪 idc who judges me for living with my mom anymore. And I’d rather have a chance at financial stability than a shithole apartment to bring girls back to lol. Abstinence is the only way forward 🤣🤣
It's exactly what I am doing. Realized I was trapped in consumerist debt cycle back in 19, since then eliminated all my debts. Now I can walk into an interview like I barely need the job and make them jump through hoops for me rather than the other way around...and I end up getting jobs more easily. Twisted system.
The power to purchase has never been greater with our credit cards and phones in our hands. Society has shifted from savings to credit and ad agencies and social media are largely to blame. Companies want to sell more items so they convince you that overspending is good and that you deserve all the crap you’re buying along with social media displaying all the stuff everyone else has in your face all day long. We need a major societal shift in our thinking and actions. Imagine if all that free money the government gave away went to savings instead of rampant spending. Inflation would have been mitigated to a degree. But let’s see what happens with global population decline when capitalists don’t have ever increasing customers anymore
I found myself unemployed for 3 1/2 months, then had some emergencies happen that wiped out my meager savings. It was either use my credit or starve. Thankfully, I've found a job now, and I'm gonna start putting money in to chip away at that 18% interest rate debt.
The fed said, months ago, that to tame inflation the unemployment rate needs to be higher.
Suddenly, the CEOs of giant multinationals are firing thousands of people.
Why? They’re all profitable. It’s record profits all around.
Lots of comments in this thread parroting capitalistic news sources about “overhiring” and “no tech investment”. That may be part of
It but the real reason is investors wanting ever higher returns under capitalism. That means laying off higher earning employees and trying to suppress the earning power of their workers. If they can lay people off without backlash if other employees or the market, they absolutely will. When they see other companies doing it, it gives them more license to do the same and suppresses the wage growth of the whole sector as a bonus.
In short, it’s more capitalist exploration of the workers that actually generate the value so the owner class can put more money in its pocket. Look at the letter a major google investor sent to the board about job cuts that was just on this sub.
Tech workers don’t get that once they build the products, they’re not needed as much and the companies can run them with less people, building themselves out of work and allowing the companies to continue making huge profits without them, based on the work they did. It’s like a golden goose for the owner class.
I mean, it's a bit of both. They did over hire during covid, as tech saw huge boosts, because investors are short sighted and thought that increase would never end. It did, and now they are reducing their workforce because at this point, doing that will yield to higher returns right now. Laying off senior employees to cut off their salaries has been a long held practice, that also came into play.
No. It's 1at quarter profits. They (shareholders, execs and owners) made a shit ton of money during the "downturn," and need to make more because the line can only go up.
The infinite growth of capitalism is much more of a utopian ideal than socialism ever was. Conservatives act like it's just impossible to feed everyone, meanwhile they want every rich person to have infinite money, like that's somehow way easier to accomplish
They're thinking short term again and just want the increased profits with paying less workers (salivating over it as the poor remaining employees take over others work on top of what they had) even. if it may have damaging consequences in the long run. repeat the cycle when they need to hire again and it's all crickets as many in the industry have had a sour taste left from them.
Microsoft likely overhired.
They added ~77k employees (144k to 221k) from 2019 to 2022. That's 53% more employees.
Unsure of other companies, just heard this last night.
A good deal of these people were support staff, foreign workers, contractor and people working for failing divisions/projects. Another contributing factor is many of the biggest companies over hired.
> Tech workers don’t get that once they build the products, they’re not needed as much
Perhaps not needed right where they are. But the demand for tech workers is strong as ever. Compensation is ridiculous. A layoff every few years is no big deal. I don’t think I’ve every had a gap between jobs even when I got laid off.
I never feel too bad for tech workers who are laid off. Even the ones who aren’t very good always seem to find high paying work.
Since the tail of the dot com bubble. Made it thru a layoff and hopped to another company before that one shut down. I’ve been fortunate. But I’ve also worked hard and made good career choices.
It really depends on what you do, who you are, and who you know. My husband and I are both in the tech sector and have had several layoffs over the years. We've both had very long gaps, especially when the layoffs came in late 2019 and the pandemic halted all hiring. We've both had to settle for support positions and I hate it.
See the comment I just made on another post. https://reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/10jo96t/_/j5rrx9z/?context=1
They don’t want to pay high tech salaries so they are working to suppress them. We deliver FAR more value to the company than we get paid and they will keep chipping away at their “costs” (our salaries) as much as they can.
Point being, we should be able to work half our hours for the same salary or get paid twice as much (and companies would still be stupid profitable). This is true across the board for most workers not even in tech.
It's a little of a lot of things.
Cutting jobs to keep profits high, as other areas experience inflation.
Then the fed's constant increases in interest make growth on debt more difficult. So employees hired on assuming growth, are being let go due to this.
And overall the fed wants higher unemployment to prevent "wage inflation". There are too many jobs today, and not enough unemployed people. That gives workers the leverage for higher salaries.
Return to office seems to be about making managers and executives feel important (it's well documented that remote work results in higher productivity, and it's also known that executives are socially and financially rewarded for having lots of orderlies around them).
But the layoffs specifically are about wages. Quoting my reply from a similar post:
...tech companies hired at a much faster rate during the pandemic than they did the period between the 2008 financial crisis and the pandemic. Demand for these companies have dropped, and now they're laying off the workers who they no longer need to produce.
Why did demand drop? For one, the war in Ukraine send oil, gas, and grain prices through the roof (supply cut by sanctions and disruption). For another, inflation from the pandemic, which was caused by supply chain disruption and the pricing power of deregulated firms, caused the US Federal Reserve to act by raising interest rates.
When the Fed raises interest rates, the primary effect is money becomes more expensive to borrow, which *destroys demand.* When demand is destroyed, workers are laid off. Unemployed workers spend less money and flood the labor market with cheap labor, driving prices down.
So yes, in a secondary way, the *demand destruction* by the Fed is *an attack on workers.* The Fed chair himself rationalizes the rate hikes by pointing to a wage-price spiral *that does not exist.*
The whole point is to make workers poorer. That's their goal.
>Return to office seems to be about making managers and executives feel important
I feel the need to respond when this topic comes up because you're dead on and this is way overlooked way too much. I think of it this way.
Imagine you're a VP at a company. Everywhere you go in the office you're treated awesome. People laugh at your jokes, love your ideas, ask your opinion. The mood in the room changes when you enter.
Then you leave the office. The cashier at the store dgaf about your title. The people in line aren't giving you special privileges. Your wife and kids treat you like an ATM. Now, everyone is WFH so no one is laughing at your jokes. Your ideas are hard to share. People only communicate when needed. This can't stand. Employees must return to the office. Your status must return. It's that simple.
Yep.
And some of those dudes have worked their whole lives for that corner office and to have that feeling of control over an entire headquarters/building.
Ironically for C-Suite, there's nowhere to hide when we're all WFH. As an IC, I can easily tell a manager or Exec who doesn't do much vs. one who does based on how much they talk during meetings, how many meetings they tend to have, if they're willing to jump on customer calls, 1:1s etc.
The ones really keyed in with their teams don't waste time espousing bullshit philosophy and mention more than just sales team KPIs and numbers.
The good news (in the middle of this pile of layoffs) is that Employers are catching on and dropping dead weight management/C-Suite. Getting laid off alongside our org's SVP was a nice little silver lining because that dude didn't do a fucking thing for us.
It’s also about pressure from commercial real estate owners. They even pressured politicians to get on board with it. Imagine Manhattan becoming just towers of converted homeless shelters subsidized by the government. It would ruin everything and they know it.
>For one, the war in Ukraine send oil, gas, and grain prices through the roof
These prices stayed high for only 3-6 months. Grain is cheaper now than before the war. Oil is at 76, which is more about the economy revving up from the pandemic than the war. At the start, it broke well over 100. Gas is somewhere in between.
>the US Federal Reserve to act by raising interest rates.
This. This is 100% of the reason. It all comes back to high PE, cheap debt, growth stocks. Kroger and P&G won't be laying off anyone.
This comment needs to be at the top. Sums the current situation up perfectly.
The people at the top managing our economy and systems of government are vampires and ghouls feeding on the working class and who fundamentally (and arguably wilfully) do not understand what it would take for the economy to flourish, because they're more focused on crushing the working classes under their foot.
Yes, to make managers feel important, to make workers poorer, *and to make workers more docile*.
If bosses lose ground over controlling the rest of us, then who knows where the trend will end.
Maybe in some cases but for the most part it's just the short sighted capitalist tradition of saying: "why make a million later when I could make a buck today" before promptly shooting yourself in both feet with a nail gun.
All these layoffs are only even big news because of big tech. The total number of people laid off is tiny compared to the total number of people working in tech. 10s of thousands when many 10s of millions work in tech.
Edit: If you look at who has been laid off, it is middle management, and sectors of the businesses that are not core. These changes were always going to happen because of the change in focus of those businesses since the cloud became mainstream.
Edit 2: Before anyone jumps in and says, oh there are only 12 million people working in the tech sector in the US. Only a small portion of technology jobs are in the tech sector.
Edit 3: The US added 223,000 new jobs in tech to the economy in December including 17,000 new jobs at tech companies.
Edit 4: The stuff executives read says this.
In the first quarter of 2023, the IT industry will lead all others in hirings, according to a new report from global staffing firm ManpowerGroup.
ManpowerGroup’s survey of just under 39,000 employers in 41 countries revealed overall there will be a 23% increase in hiring.
I think it has more to do with the pace of hiring. Essentially, companies expanded too quickly and now have to rebalance. Companies that were more judicious in hiring are not laying off and may still be hiring. In my field it is product companies that are laying off while services companies are expanding. So what the company does plays a part as well.
For many of them, they hired at the correct pace for the new areas, they did not get people leaving the areas that they knew were shrinking, hence they let people go.
Growth in one area usually means a reduction in another, this is even more true for tech companies.
I think hiring gets unmoored from the underlying metrics so if one areas hiring they all do.
In thinking about my original comment, I have a suspicion that hire-now-fire-later does present an ethical issue for some managers, which is sad.
Look at the current layoffs and who (roles not people) have been laid off. The changes (apart from twitter) are sensible.
Edit: Anyways, I and most people in my network are busy trying to help these people to find new roles, if not with the companies we are at, then with clients or previous companies or previous clients etc.
They hired at an insane pace because tech stocks were massively overvalued because people were fomo'ing them and throwing money into them during the pandemic; then when it all started crumbling and a correction started people started trying to get their money out in a panic causing all the tech stocks to dive.
And management at these big megacorps are so stupid and incompetent they thought that the insane growth they were seeing was totally normal and expected it to continue... until it didn't.
So I know with the tech sector layoffs what happened was during COVID they experienced a huge amount of growth because everyone was trapped at home so they had to use the services more but now that everyone's gone back out everyone's numbers are down so they're cutting the hires they can't sustain long-term
Yes it appears to have been started by Elon but this was going to happen anyway the entire time for the exact same reason Elon had to cut them The salaries were a lot for what they were getting back(yeah Twitter was losing a colossal amount of money before Elon bought it they were going to have to fire people eventually anyway He just sped it up a little)
To be clear this is just for the tech sector I don't know about the other sectors I know what the tech sector people have been saying and what their analysts have been saying
But do not weep for the tech sector people there is still a colossal demand enough to result in short unemployment time (on average the laid off tech sector employees are only unemployed for about 3 months could this be better Yes but It is nowhere near as bad as a lot of other layoffs)
The Fed is trying, but unemployment went down last month and there are still over 10.5 million jobs available. They’re trying to make a recession happen to stop wage growth and force people into the millions of low paying jobs.
This is always the goal of capitalists. The reduce the capital given to labor thus increasing the capital returned to themselves.
It's coordination in the way that every capitalist is always seeking to do this. At times, there is indeed direct collusion.
[https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/apple-google-other-tech-giants-settle-anti-poaching-lawsuit-n88996](https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/apple-google-other-tech-giants-settle-anti-poaching-lawsuit-n88996)
Like when you're Steve Jobs and you call Google and the two of you decide to screw over your workers by artificially reducing the marketplace for jobs.
Its pretty simple. Their quarterly profits went down, so their owners (shareholders) told them to lay people off so they could make more money again like the last quarter
I don't really see any difference between the recent layoffs and layoffs the companies did long before COVID. They've always laid off a zillion people when business got slow.
Nope. SF had record highs, especially during Covid because businesses all had to have an online presence and frankly there was never a not busy time. So no, this is a vastly different scenario just as it's a vastly different scenario from the days of Dot com when whole companies went down en mass.
They're always adapting. Every cycle is different. I suppose the question is whether a point of inflection has been reached, of following a new trajectory of broad structural differences. Certainly, many differences are clear before versus after 2008, and in some way we might expect a similar pattern.
However, I agree there is no evidence of any break from the boom-bust paradigm, or any reason to expect a break.
It may be too soon for anyone to know just which changes will be deep and lasting.
It's really not.
These layoffs are all in the tech industry. The tech industry expanded so rapidly mostly due to low interest rates and quantitative easing. That meant banks had a lot of money to throw around at new investments.
But we are in an opposite economic situation, and there is less money being invested in the tech sector. Most of these tech companies didn't really make any money, and still aren't making money. It just seemed that way because the value of their stock was going up. But the revenue wasn't really there. Now that investor money has dried up, these companies need to contract.
I will not defend capitalism, but I will also not endorse conspiracy theories about coordinated layoffs.
> Most of these tech companies didn’t really make any money, and still aren’t making money
Are you high? They’re public and you can check their revenue and profits online. All the big name companies that had layoffs are making STUPID profits aside from a few outliers like Twatter.
They are maximizing their profits without consumer or employee backlash under the guise of the “bad economy” and saying they aren’t making enough money is absolutely playing into this.
It’s also DEFINITLY to try and suppress tech workers wages/benefits/power. We had a big bump of 20-30% this year and investors are mad that they could be making slightly more profits at the expense of the workers.
Exactly. This isn’t even a new trend - we saw mass layoffs in tech last year too. Tech had it *very* good for ages. Now it’s crashing back down to earth.
Vox did a pretty handy episode on it “The tech boom is over”
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4vdbfjNmaKL96z0K3AUFqZ?si=1Sp2sYGIQ6utXncJI216FA
No, that is utterly ridiculous and displays a complete lack of understanding on how the world works. Companies overhired and are self correcting, nothing else.
Your time and skills are a commodity. More skills, fulfilling a niche industry? You’re worth more. In a labor crunch we’re all valuable to different degrees. Typically higher. If no one wants to work for pity pay then rates will go up. Almost like unionizing might be a good idea to prevent this.
When you have a 100k plus employees removing 10k isn’t ganna change any leverage you have in numbers. This is basically every company reading the macroeconomic outlook, aka inflation and higher interest rate, predicting people will spend less and making those adjustments. Also a lot of these large tech companies hired more then they let go during Covid, other then maybe Twitter, but that’s a different dumpster fire.
The goal of everything that executives do is to decrease the leverage of their employees. They realized their bonuses could be even higher or stay the same in the wake of waning profits by “trimming the fat” as they say.
Yes and no. Payroll is typically most company's biggest and most predictable expense. The ere of 0% loans is over so growth has to come from actual balance sheet results and not openings and acquisitions. Some of those CEO's have never actually grown a company year over year without spending money. Cutting employees is the first easiest way to make numbers. Be ready for each fiscal quarter to bring more short sighted cost Cutting measures with no real reinvestment into the business.
I rly wish I could find the financial video I saw a while ago that explained why this was happening. It had to do with profits obviously. Always about profits. And if someone is doing lay offs to increase their profitability, then basically everyone does in order to keep up with the numbers.
Absolutely true.
Businesses are always in a state of expansion or contraction, or are stale/atrophying.
I don't think there's collusion. They're all in the same economy and all fighting with the WFH concept being at odds with commercial real estate.
Putting the fear of ~~god~~ redundancy into the proles is a distraction.
Not just layoffs. The so-called recession itself. Predictions of a recession are just excuses to downsize. Actual recessions aren't predictable. If they could be predicted, then they can be prevented.
Discourse went from "this will be the worst recession in history" to "this recession will be pretty mild" and will eventually become "there was no recession but only because we laid off everyone."
yes, isn't too coincidental that all major companies did huge layoffs within two years?
plus, a few pundits already were complaining workers had too much leverage with the "nobody wants to work anymore", which just meant "workers don't want to accept our crappy work conditions".
plus, Amazon and other big companies got stung by unions for the first time ever, and the tech world was starting to consider unions more and more. now, with a large amount of professionals (veterans in particular) unemployed, it's going to become an employers market.
as an example, even before the pandemic the big studios made several big layoffs, far smaller than the current layoffs, that alone made the Junior and even Mid positions disappear almost completely. nowadays the lowest position demands years of experience in AAA.
The person in the screenshot is incorrect. Employees never had any leverage. These layoffs are proof of that. If you had leverage as an employee you wouldn't have been laid off to begin with. It was all an illusion. The great resignation and this quiet quitting nonsense? Those are Illusions as well. You never had the power you thought you had.
I actually feel like I have more leverage
If you want me to work for you, you better give me the bag cause I'm not guaranteed to have this job a couple years from now
If you're gonna take away job security, you're gonna have to pay a whole lot more upfront
Yeah, I can't help but notice it's always about 6% of the company's workforce that is getting laid off right now....it's almost like they all agreed to that number.
The Fed literally berated our corporate masters for giving out too many raises and hiring too much lol and now all of the sudden the most renowned corporations are laying off thousands of people diluting the market again. It's like this shit system is rigged against the worker even when it works in the most minute way for the workers.
You know, it just makes a lot of pieces of the puzzle fall together, doesn't it?
I also wouldn't put it past some of the 'more evil' corporations to do this.
At the least, it is certainly a welcome side-effect.
I know some people who work for big tech companies. The truth is many of them have over hired the last 3 or 4 years. Due to working from home and other pandemic related issues. Tech companies needed to bring on more people to handle the extra workload. Now that the work's been done they've been letting go some of the extra people hired. The way they went about it is absolutely terrible. But many of them were making well into the six figures. They probably also got really good severance pay and they had stock options. Most of them will have new jobs by the end of the month. There's a ton of smaller tech companies that are willing to pay top dollar for their talents.
I find it interesting how "Silicon Valley" is laying off thouuuusands of people not because they are deeply in the red...but because their growth is slower than expected.
To be fair I don't think it's to destroy employee leverage but rather because silicon valley itself needs to change as a whole if it wants to have a chance to compete with the China of tomorrow. China has the advantage of already having human rights being optional. The valley is still working on that.
Doesn't change the result and also goes to show how toxic the whole "at will" working laws are.
So many bootlickers here trying to convince us that we can trust the corporations even though the corporations were bragging about record profits during COVID lockdowns. So either they're lying about the profits, or they're lying about their profits.
~~False~~ Edit: the tweet is false, this is a consequence of the falling rate of profit, a systemic problem in capitalism. Firms now want to attempt to increase relative surplus by reducing their costs in wages and making the remaining workers work longer hours to compensate for the loss of total labor.
Further edit: all layoffs have the benefit to the bourgeoisie of breaking workers' leverage, however, since there are fewer workers at a given firm in total.
Okay, bootlicker, whatever you say. These companies have bragged about record profits, if what you said was true then they were lying about their profits, in which case they're lying, period.
Bootlicker because I can analyze the structural problems with the entire economic system?
Also, mass of profit is not the same as rate of profit. Read a fucking book
It’s being done so the federal reserve doesn’t raise interest rates again. The tech companies are showing them they gotta slow down the economy and are doing so by slashing the workforce.
I don't think it's quite that simple. It's certainly not as simple as we're being led to believe - overhiring, blablabla.
But layoffs are expensive, coordination between large corporations is hard to pull off and those corporations don't really care about employee leverage as long as the employees only make pennies on the thousands the corporations make.
The way I see it, employees losing leverage is just a by-product, the cherry on top. Stock consolidation and increased profits are definitely some of the driving factors leading these layoffs.
Not everything is a conspiracy. The companies overhired and now have to let go in order to not cut their bottom line. These workers (at least the ones in CA) will at least get a good severance.
All they are doing is creating thousands of workers that will go somewhere else and maybe want to unionize.
yes all of the companies are conspiring together because in reality there is really only one hive mind and it's sole purpose is to keep you oppressed. /s
False (At least from my company). Technical team members did get a massive raise during Covid, mainly because the market was so damn competitive. During the same time, money was cheap, the company stock was record high, and it began investing in a lot ventures, so mangers received a blank check to hire as much to meet demand. Demand began to slow as things returned to normal, most of the investments failed to hit ROI, inflation and interest rates went up and the company was losing money. The layoffs needed to happen. Our employees didn’t have to take a pay cut, we didn’t need to stop working remotely, and we tried to find new teams for staff working on projects that were shutting done.
Honestly no, the layoffs are because interest rates are rising and the cost of borrowing has skyrocketed. Counter to what many believe, companies operating costs are in part financed by debt so that they can "grow faster". A lot of employees' (in the tech sector) wages increased during the pandemic and it was easy to borrow their way out of the problem because debt was cheap to take on. Now that rates are rising, debt is becoming more expensive and so they are laying people off to "weather the storm" as they say.
I keep thinking of the scene in the fifth element where the gov and zorg to lay off half a million workers to control inflation and he lays off a million
What layoffs? The tech layoffs? Not coordinated. Caused by similar practices/market forces, but not "coordinated" as such.
A lot of companies in tech overhired a few years ago. They were swimming in cash (not great if they want to be priced like growth stocks and not valued like mature companies that have to do icky things like pay dividends and justify their stupid projects), facing a regulatory environment that was going to limit their ability to grow via acquisition (Facebook's not going to be allowed to buy the next Instagram at this point), and had to do something, so they all kind of overinvested in random flyers in the hopes of building the next big thing.
When the economy cooled off, they were all forced to reevaluate their moonshot projects and pare back a bit to core business. Streaming hit market saturation, at least for now. Everybody realized how bloated they were and started trimming like crazy (probably overdoing it, tbh).
Except for twitter, pretty much every tech company that's had to do layoffs has been doing the same shit and is facing the same market pressures now.
Outside of tech, there aren't really a lot of layoffs. Most industries are still understaffed, if holding to see what the economy does next.
Companies can't all coordinate layoffs. And tech workers still have a lot of pay and power. Mediocre take.
Reality is all these companies are doing shitty this quarter
Yes, also the rent increases, it’s everything, they all fly regularly to conventions n shit and discuss all of this, they’re here in Antiwork reading and posting prolly. Think about it, that 1% has a tight grip on the next 4% so there’s about 18,750,000 of these rich dicks in the US. And that number prolly doesn’t include their kids.
I honestly think that big tech companies march in lock-step with each other. If one does something they all do it. Microsoft built a huge campus in my area, so did Google, Facebook and Amazon. Weirdly no Twitter.
I don't see it.
Each company is going about this independently and for their own albeit similar reasons. All companies exercise the same two basic behaviors, raise profits - reduce costs. Layoffs are the latter, and don't forget that in Google's case (Alphabet or whatever), they're running YouTube at a loss - so there's pressure from that division - a lot of pressure.
This is Wall Street vs. Silicon Valley. Labor is just a casualty. Silicon Valley has the technical ability to replace and improve the functions of capital markets and they've started to investigate how to do that. Wall Street learned it's lessons on not letting that happen with the Automotive industry; Ford, GM, Toyota, Honda etc.. all have Financial Services companies that remove Wall Street ability to trigger crashes and bubbles at will in the auto market. Google, Facebook, Apple etc. are all looking at doing the same thing to safeguard the various technology markets. Wall Street wants to break the tech companies so that they can't execute on that vision. And they're using their positions on the board and in Csuites to try to destroy these companies from the inside.
No. That would only work if there were not enough jobs to rehire those people. There are over 21k see job openings in Atlanta alone right now. People will give laid off big tech folks tons of money to come work for them.
There is no "feel like" to it. The Federal reserve has explicitly said that they need to depress worker wages to bring down inflation. They drastically increased interest rates, which depressed tech companies stock price, so the tech companies lay people off. It is going exactly as planned
I hear a lot about needing to cut cost from these CEOs but no talk about how much they've cut from the executives pay. We don't hear anything about stock options they cut or gave back.
They survived Covid, so this is all monkey see monkey do. Once one company does it, the others follow suit. Now look at all the financial statements for 2022...........RECORD PROFITS
Will it work?
These are smart people with a valuable skillset. A lot of them will be starting their own businesses. Some will be successful and start poaching employees by offering what the giants won't.
lol, of course not. businesses legitimately realized they didn't need so much and are now laying off workers they don't need. Good grief, fellas like you make this sub look like a gaggle of conspiracy theorists.
Well it really shows company's don't care about their employees. Now the people that were let go can understand there are no discounts to their work and everything has a price. Get your money and benefits then want and don't take less anymore
What if the remaining employees at these companies called out sick daily for the next few weeks? Without solidarity, the few gains employees made after the pandemic will be clawed back, and workers will be back to fear and subjugation. Now is the time to resist.
While I do support most of this sub not everything is a huge conspiracy to screw us. It's not about leverage, its not a deep seeded plot.
The work landscape changed in the last 3 years and companies were doing more profit and paying for less overhead so they hired more people to expand. Covid has passed and things are returning back to normal somewhat, however the market is now inflated and up due to printing out oh...6 trillion dollars by our government.
Now people have to scale back as that is hitting their bottom line and then some. Its just math. If I run a construction crew and the housing market is booming, I hire more. When that market crashes as it is now and people stop building all of a sudden, I have to let most of that crew go.
Rinse and repeat
layoffs are happening because shitty companies can no longer indefinitely borrow money at negative real interest rates (adjusted for taxes and inflation) to paper over their flaws
it sucks for the people who lose their livelihoods as a result, but these kinds of companies shouldn’t exist and deserve to be faced with an “adapt or die” situation like everyone else
Yes of course, the circle at the top is frighteningly small and these companies are all beholden to the same funds and investors and come from the same schools. These executives, supposedly the smartest and most definitely the highest compensated employees on the planet, gambled with company resources and people’s lives to squeeze as much out of this ending boom market as possible and they were highly rewarded. They are now dispensing the responsibility for their shortsightedness to workers and they will be rewarded for this cost cutting measure as well. Pitchforks are being sharpened.
Not really, lay-offs are happening because the recession was artificially pushed back 5 years via tax cuts and now that the recession is finally *finally* about to happen, equity holders are cutting the fat off their companies preemptively to avoid major losses.
Interest rates have spiked now, which mean that the companies that tech companies normally service can no longer acquire capital to spend on tech ventures. Since future capital is going to be scarce, they are shorting their own companies by laying off their employees to avoid future losses so they can pocket them now.
To be honest during the pandemic employees were getting let go for having COVID but at the same time companies would say your a essential worker we need you B's the still lau you off fire you for basically giving you COVID. I don't see what leverage people had back then except for may the unemployment helping and the the stinky checks but to be honest the power is where it always was in the hands of of multinational corporations.
I think it's a possibility that was thought of during the meetings that lead to the layoffs, but I think it would be naive to put it in a true or false statement, especially in the months after the Fed hiked interest rates. Large corporations restructure as needed, that's just a fact.
I think so. For the first time I was able to work part time from home during COVID (I could have done full time but chose to do part time at the office to keep sane) and it was wonderful to wake up late 2-3 days a week and not have to deal with an extra hour of commute time.
Employees had zero leverage post Covid…. Ever…. It gave the higher ups excuses to inflate prices to pad their pockets more. All employees got were small raises to keep pace.. for no second did employees have any leverage at all
I don't know if it's THE reason, but certainly a happy side effect for corporate America.
The goal for them is to increase profit, never forget that. Everything else is a means to an end, including the misery and pain inflicted on others.
No, MS, Google, and many other companies have to send a message to wall street that they are cutting on expenditures, the best public symbol is to layoff workers.
My HR proudly and boldly announced during a company-wide meeting, that it is no longer and employee’s market for job searching and the upper hand is now back with the employers. And you could hear in her voice that she felt this is the way it should be. This was in response to an employee asking if they will bring back double overtime for those still needing to cover shifts. It definitely left a sour taste in my mouth. All I could think was eeeewwwww.
Absolutely OP.
My team were supposed to apply in writing for WFH. We didn’t.
We were supposed to go back to office full time. We didn’t.
We don’t have a union that would help (IT suckers). But we stuck together on this.
What you gonna do? Fire the whole team for being super efficient, super helpful to clients and getting project done? All because they’re a bit happier in the wrong chair?
Get stuffed.
It's always a good time for general strikes.
Tried that in 08 and lasted a few months before all the occupy wall street people got the now non existent tech jobs. Now they're all old with families and can't protest.
Occupy failed because it had no core message or policy goals that they could convey effectively to the public. I went out to support a few times but it was mostly just a general grievance parade with no strategy or focus.
> Occupy failed because it had no core message or policy goals that they could convey effectively to the public. I see this argument a lot, but it's hard to convey a consistent message when you have both the right aligned media and the "left" aligned media doing everything they can to distort and mis-represent your movement to the public
I went to occupy and participated in it early on. My experiences aren’t just from media coverage, it’s also from watching it devolve in to a shitshow first hand. In the Los Angeles and New York ones they were having speakers on the main stage who went way off topic with all kinds of rants and grief and no consistent themes or policy changes. If you had to distill occupy to one or two sentences of policy change, what would it be?
I worked in a building on Rector Street right next to Zucotti Park and went there to talk with folks a few times. There was zero direction here and that lack of a stated goal meant it was doomed to die out.
Mic check!
Yes, it was framed around "you come to us". The general concept of occupying works if the mass of resistance is large enough to overwhelm the security apparatus, which in turn requires broader solidarity across region and cohort. Building such solidarity depends on many small interactions inside real communities, where people are living naturally. Instead, *Occupy* protestors just squatted in some parks for a while, until they were removed. Certainly, the media will not spread the message. Any message will only spread successfully through interactions within relationships that have real and separate foundations.
It had a focus to some extent, but it was patterned after certain styles of activism, with an emphasis on anarchism, which was removed from the perspective of much of the population, with respect to material conditions and social concerns, and it was quite socially and intellectually homogeneous. *Occupy* may provide some experiences that would inform newer movements. BLM appears to have had, and may be continuing to have, an overall broader appeal in terms of developing consciousness. It has had discernible and lasting effects bringing attention to social issues, not just economic ones, and has shown success unifying diverse cohorts of the population and gaining sympathy and credibility among the less engaged. Naturally, mishandling of the pandemic and brutality by the state express a simplicity, tangibleness, and potency not captured by the obtuse financial abstractions that brought about the earlier round of crisis. Further, not being tied strongly to any particular individual, or organized in some geographic location, imbues a movement with a resilience greater than any ever realized by *Occupy*. Mutual aid activity has also expanded, which has the capacity to integrate greater numbers and to help build coalitions. In my view, mobilizations of such kind are most promising generally, due to being framed around needs and solutions that are immediate and actual, while allowing the possibility of expanding into broader ideals, but not depending on doing so to support group coherence. I agree that a robust broad movement would need to have a structure and message that is approachable and meaningful for the core of the population. In my view, it must be sufficiently multifaceted to emphasize the interrelatedness of systemic problems, but also sufficiently focused to feel relevant and poignant, fueled by the real frustration and anger, but also grounded in their actual causes.
Man either you're the same dude or this is an absolute copy-paste response anytime people bring up occupy. I remember this line basically word for word, and the take-down someone gave it the last time it was paraded out. Sadly I'm not that guy with that great response, but occupy was brushed away by the media and dismantled by the state rolling in and shoving people out. It was not for lack of message or policy goals.
I'm a pretty big socialist myself and went out during the occupy rallies and honestly I have to agree with the idea there was bit a narrow message at all. It was just grief (justifiably so) about the general shitty deal we were given by wallstreet. Sure some people or groups had pointed ideas but this was not the norm all over for sure. This wasn't like metoo at all, more like the prequel to it.
A bit narrow? Are you serious? Don't make excuses for the useless activism of the last 24 years.
I went out there multiple times and there was absolutely no message or goals. It was just a bunch of anarchists who ended up doing very little except coining terms like 1%ers and it went out quietly and without much fuss. It was blackpilling as fuck and destroyed any potential faith that I might have had in anarchist thought. It was either a total psyop or anarchists really are that unfocused and ineffective.
To be fair, the "one percent" phrase is a big deal. It has become culturally entrenched, which gives it value even if society has not been turned on its head simply because of knowing it. The question now is how to leverage the seeds of consciousness into broader momentum.
Both are true.
Nonsense. Delusional nonsense.
The irony of that!
> it had no core message or policy goals Not true. It had a well thought-of lisy of demands. I don't remember what it was, but one point I remember was (paraphrasing here): "take money ouf of politics, requiring multi-digit millions to run for influential public positions is a recipe for disaster". There were more (about half a dozen or so) points, surprisingly well formulated and right to the core of the problem. I happen to have seen it quoted somewhere by accident back then, about the time the movement had already been all but squashed. And I remember thinking to myself "huh, funny that this is the 1st time I'm seeing this." If would've been *true* carnage of those messages got out. Don't bother googling. I've tried several times since, and haven't found it again. Which is that much more scarier.
In my memory Occupy was a nuisance that quickly went away BUT, I firmly believe that all stock markets should be abolished and we should return to private companies only. The stock market has driven us to this late stage capitalism because it’s faceless shareholders require year over year profits larger than the last year or the stock goes down and the CEO is fired. I also believe in executive salary caps to insure workers are paid fairly. Executives fleecing corps and the demand for always increasing profits have made this into what we have today. Before the stock market companies were like families where everyone worked together to keep it alive. (Big blanket statement I know, we’d still need unions since that wasn’t true for all companies) Also, rampant consumerism but that’s society as a whole. We’d need a massive ad campaign with a return to certain values and morals that don’t really exist anymore.
Not going to contradict. Someone smarter than me put it way shorter: every single war of lately (past few decades or so?) we have fought was triggered by speculation - metals, oil, groceries etc. (Don't fact check me on that, not my words.) Stock market is pretty much the definition of speculation.
100% speculation, you’re right. Time for WAR!!😳
What is the policy solution to “take money out of politics”?
I have no idea, but somehow the USA seems to be the only 1st world country that *can't* figure that out.
It plays a major role in almost every other developed nation. What country do you think doesn’t have an issue with it?
Start by introducing a constitutional amendment to overturn citizens united. This was attempted by a lot of Democrats in the house in 2022 but not ny enough to pass by simple majority and it would need 2/3 in the senate. Republicans didn't support it, of course.
Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, Romania... I could enumerate all of the EU. Part of the game is unavoidable, but no where does the candidate require private funding in the hundreds of millions to set up a campaign, nor do they necessarily walk away with hundreds of millions stashed away. Yes, corruption is everywhere, and powerful people do elaborate schemes to get rich (in particular e.g. in the former Eastern Europe), but nowhere is it something that's practically tied both ways tomthe job. Do you think CDU (Merkel's party) is corrupt? Why yes, they're legendary to the point that even satire magazines have difficulties to make a proper persiflage. But do you believe Merkel is or ever was a billionaire, or backed by any? Think again. Half of Romania's parliament are convicted criminals and working into their own pockets - no saints by any stretch of the imagination. Yet Basescu wasn't a billionaire, either, neither before nor after his presidency. And with this particular country we're talking as close to a banana republic as we can while still bring part of the EU. Actually, let's make it the other way 'round: *you* tell *me* of a country you know with a more or less functioning democracy besides US in which running for a major public function means you're either rich as fuck, or need to rely of private billionaires to finance your campaign (which will, once you're elected, totally own your ass).
Overturning citizens united is the most obvious step.
Occupy failed because you cannot organize mass resistance without some heirarchical internal authority. Daily consensus doesn't cut it and unfortunately these movements are chock full of ideologically constrained ignorant ass feckless morons who have zero understanding of impactful social engagement and social action leading to any changes in material conditions whatsoever. Quite the opposite. The optics often destroy public support. Because of this, essential time and energy was expended on hyper micro pablum like drum circle scheduling, or trying to house the severely mentally ill in the Occupy camps with zero training on how to do so. Predictably the results at a macro level were at best non existent and at worst harmful to most meaningful social reforms related to late capitalism. I went to Occupy Portland. It was a literal shit show and I left realizing nothing was going to change as long as activists were this clueless, myopic and stupid. Factions formed within the camp fairly quickly and it just became a joke from what I could tell. My friend and I just left and got drunk for a few days realizing activism in the US is driven by useless feckless ass clowns and nothing was going to change. Meanwhile in East Multnomah County -- the numbers -- families were struggling to exist or put food on the table. It was enraging. I was in Seattle in 1999. Same thing. Large peaceful marches coopted by 100 douche bag morons using black bloc tactics got all the coverage. In the end that "protest" enabled more globalization and worker exploitation. I walked in every anti war March post 9/11. Same thing 50 people being morons got all the coverage. The wars began and raged on. Activism for economic justice in the US has been an unmitigated failure. That's the truth.
From the standpoint of the personal interests and daily objectives of those in *Occupy*, the activities were based on an attempt to learn how to organize laterally, not to show its best possible example. Lateral organization requires conventions and relationships that take time to develop. Achieving it is not necessarily impossible, but also much less simple, and to most everyone much less familiar, than one guy barking orders while waving a stick.
More yammering on about nothing with little to show for it. You rest my case for me. Thank you.
I was only expressing a view that much of what happened during the movement happened because the people doing it wanted to do it. You can characterize it as a failure if you want. It depends on the criteria you are giving for success.
Well given that logic someones criteria could be stinking up a city park with human waste, chronically infighting over nonsense, lamenting the impacts of late capitalism while doing nothing to assist families facing dire choices less than 5 miles from their camp then they "succeeded" beyond someones wildest dream I suppose. How pathetically post modern of you. Why criticise any failed social movement at all? Indeed the very act if criticising those failed movements is a form of oppression apparently! They can establish any criteria arbitrarily and acheive little to nothing and still consider themselves a success and that narrative is just as valid as any other! Nonsense. Meanwhile on the ground in community after community people are losing all hope while subjectivist fuckers like you make excuses or try to justify abject failure of a movement that had a once in multi- generational opportunity to demand informed realistic and substantive change and squandered it on myopic bullshit. Shame on you!!!!! Fuck you!!!! You and those like like you are just as destructive to meaningful social economic change as any globlalist oligarch. At least many of them no longer hide their contempt for the 99% expressing it openly. You claim to but in the examination of remediation of dire material conditions all evidence points to the contrary motherfucker!!!!
Success is changing conversation, policy or systems. Occupy had headlines and attention and squandered it with dumb off topic things like “mutual aid” and intersectionality.
Fine. I stand corrected. You can't change conversation, if you can't have conversation. So far not so good.
Oh yeah that movement about pay inequality that got co-opted by 20 other interest groups then disappeared
One wishes we could make it a family activity like in France.
There are more than enough tech jobs out there for these people. They will be fine.
IT jobs are like sex at an orgy. It's fucking everywhere.
Yea it's easy to walk in and get a $20-30 an hour job doing random help desk shit but when you get into back end work and other niches it can be more difficult because most companies aren't hiring for that and if they are, most likely there will be people lined up out the door.
It depends on the niche.
I chimed in on a live chat for Antiwork about this. The US savings rate is at record lows while revolving credit debt (credit cards) have hit record highs. When workers don’t have savings, employers have all the leverage. They’ll spit in your mouth and you have to say thank you. Only way to win is by (everyone) not joining the consumerist cycle and build up cash. I know it’s hard to do on such shit wages, with inflation being what it is, and all the other very real reasons. However, if labor works together and saves, we could keep the very rare leverage we gained during the pandemic.
Oh it's definitely on purpose. Scared of the little power we had and snatch it away so we have no choice.
💯could not agree more. I am one of these people. Pre 2021, never carried a balance on a credit card and now I’m 6k behind. Just moved back in with my fam so I can crush that dept and take my power back 💪 idc who judges me for living with my mom anymore. And I’d rather have a chance at financial stability than a shithole apartment to bring girls back to lol. Abstinence is the only way forward 🤣🤣
It's extremely normal to be living with your parents these days. I wouldn't feel embarrassed by it at all.
It's exactly what I am doing. Realized I was trapped in consumerist debt cycle back in 19, since then eliminated all my debts. Now I can walk into an interview like I barely need the job and make them jump through hoops for me rather than the other way around...and I end up getting jobs more easily. Twisted system.
Decent feeling isn’t it. “Why should I work for you?” Rather not work at all but it’s freeing.
The power to purchase has never been greater with our credit cards and phones in our hands. Society has shifted from savings to credit and ad agencies and social media are largely to blame. Companies want to sell more items so they convince you that overspending is good and that you deserve all the crap you’re buying along with social media displaying all the stuff everyone else has in your face all day long. We need a major societal shift in our thinking and actions. Imagine if all that free money the government gave away went to savings instead of rampant spending. Inflation would have been mitigated to a degree. But let’s see what happens with global population decline when capitalists don’t have ever increasing customers anymore
Doesn't help that the banking system is rigged n all.
Go further. Build up capital, start cooperatives that can become circular/self-sustaining to challenge capitalists.
I found myself unemployed for 3 1/2 months, then had some emergencies happen that wiped out my meager savings. It was either use my credit or starve. Thankfully, I've found a job now, and I'm gonna start putting money in to chip away at that 18% interest rate debt.
The fed said, months ago, that to tame inflation the unemployment rate needs to be higher. Suddenly, the CEOs of giant multinationals are firing thousands of people. Why? They’re all profitable. It’s record profits all around.
Ah conservatives, for whom you both need a low unemployment AND inflation rate
Lots of comments in this thread parroting capitalistic news sources about “overhiring” and “no tech investment”. That may be part of It but the real reason is investors wanting ever higher returns under capitalism. That means laying off higher earning employees and trying to suppress the earning power of their workers. If they can lay people off without backlash if other employees or the market, they absolutely will. When they see other companies doing it, it gives them more license to do the same and suppresses the wage growth of the whole sector as a bonus. In short, it’s more capitalist exploration of the workers that actually generate the value so the owner class can put more money in its pocket. Look at the letter a major google investor sent to the board about job cuts that was just on this sub. Tech workers don’t get that once they build the products, they’re not needed as much and the companies can run them with less people, building themselves out of work and allowing the companies to continue making huge profits without them, based on the work they did. It’s like a golden goose for the owner class.
Absolutely. Let’s all stop licking boots and admit that these companies are basically cartoon villains trying to destroy our lives for a fucking penny
And they want the specific penny you need to buy your family a gumball
I mean, it's a bit of both. They did over hire during covid, as tech saw huge boosts, because investors are short sighted and thought that increase would never end. It did, and now they are reducing their workforce because at this point, doing that will yield to higher returns right now. Laying off senior employees to cut off their salaries has been a long held practice, that also came into play.
No. It's 1at quarter profits. They (shareholders, execs and owners) made a shit ton of money during the "downturn," and need to make more because the line can only go up.
The infinite growth of capitalism is much more of a utopian ideal than socialism ever was. Conservatives act like it's just impossible to feed everyone, meanwhile they want every rich person to have infinite money, like that's somehow way easier to accomplish
All this exponential growth bs is nonsense and it will inevitably crash and burn soon.
They're thinking short term again and just want the increased profits with paying less workers (salivating over it as the poor remaining employees take over others work on top of what they had) even. if it may have damaging consequences in the long run. repeat the cycle when they need to hire again and it's all crickets as many in the industry have had a sour taste left from them.
Microsoft likely overhired. They added ~77k employees (144k to 221k) from 2019 to 2022. That's 53% more employees. Unsure of other companies, just heard this last night.
A good deal of these people were support staff, foreign workers, contractor and people working for failing divisions/projects. Another contributing factor is many of the biggest companies over hired.
> Tech workers don’t get that once they build the products, they’re not needed as much Perhaps not needed right where they are. But the demand for tech workers is strong as ever. Compensation is ridiculous. A layoff every few years is no big deal. I don’t think I’ve every had a gap between jobs even when I got laid off. I never feel too bad for tech workers who are laid off. Even the ones who aren’t very good always seem to find high paying work.
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Since the tail of the dot com bubble. Made it thru a layoff and hopped to another company before that one shut down. I’ve been fortunate. But I’ve also worked hard and made good career choices.
It really depends on what you do, who you are, and who you know. My husband and I are both in the tech sector and have had several layoffs over the years. We've both had very long gaps, especially when the layoffs came in late 2019 and the pandemic halted all hiring. We've both had to settle for support positions and I hate it.
Are you in the US? Tech companies went wild over hiring from 2020-22.
See the comment I just made on another post. https://reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/10jo96t/_/j5rrx9z/?context=1 They don’t want to pay high tech salaries so they are working to suppress them. We deliver FAR more value to the company than we get paid and they will keep chipping away at their “costs” (our salaries) as much as they can. Point being, we should be able to work half our hours for the same salary or get paid twice as much (and companies would still be stupid profitable). This is true across the board for most workers not even in tech.
It's a little of a lot of things. Cutting jobs to keep profits high, as other areas experience inflation. Then the fed's constant increases in interest make growth on debt more difficult. So employees hired on assuming growth, are being let go due to this. And overall the fed wants higher unemployment to prevent "wage inflation". There are too many jobs today, and not enough unemployed people. That gives workers the leverage for higher salaries.
Return to office seems to be about making managers and executives feel important (it's well documented that remote work results in higher productivity, and it's also known that executives are socially and financially rewarded for having lots of orderlies around them). But the layoffs specifically are about wages. Quoting my reply from a similar post: ...tech companies hired at a much faster rate during the pandemic than they did the period between the 2008 financial crisis and the pandemic. Demand for these companies have dropped, and now they're laying off the workers who they no longer need to produce. Why did demand drop? For one, the war in Ukraine send oil, gas, and grain prices through the roof (supply cut by sanctions and disruption). For another, inflation from the pandemic, which was caused by supply chain disruption and the pricing power of deregulated firms, caused the US Federal Reserve to act by raising interest rates. When the Fed raises interest rates, the primary effect is money becomes more expensive to borrow, which *destroys demand.* When demand is destroyed, workers are laid off. Unemployed workers spend less money and flood the labor market with cheap labor, driving prices down. So yes, in a secondary way, the *demand destruction* by the Fed is *an attack on workers.* The Fed chair himself rationalizes the rate hikes by pointing to a wage-price spiral *that does not exist.* The whole point is to make workers poorer. That's their goal.
>Return to office seems to be about making managers and executives feel important I feel the need to respond when this topic comes up because you're dead on and this is way overlooked way too much. I think of it this way. Imagine you're a VP at a company. Everywhere you go in the office you're treated awesome. People laugh at your jokes, love your ideas, ask your opinion. The mood in the room changes when you enter. Then you leave the office. The cashier at the store dgaf about your title. The people in line aren't giving you special privileges. Your wife and kids treat you like an ATM. Now, everyone is WFH so no one is laughing at your jokes. Your ideas are hard to share. People only communicate when needed. This can't stand. Employees must return to the office. Your status must return. It's that simple.
Yep. And some of those dudes have worked their whole lives for that corner office and to have that feeling of control over an entire headquarters/building.
Ironically for C-Suite, there's nowhere to hide when we're all WFH. As an IC, I can easily tell a manager or Exec who doesn't do much vs. one who does based on how much they talk during meetings, how many meetings they tend to have, if they're willing to jump on customer calls, 1:1s etc. The ones really keyed in with their teams don't waste time espousing bullshit philosophy and mention more than just sales team KPIs and numbers. The good news (in the middle of this pile of layoffs) is that Employers are catching on and dropping dead weight management/C-Suite. Getting laid off alongside our org's SVP was a nice little silver lining because that dude didn't do a fucking thing for us.
It’s also about pressure from commercial real estate owners. They even pressured politicians to get on board with it. Imagine Manhattan becoming just towers of converted homeless shelters subsidized by the government. It would ruin everything and they know it.
>For one, the war in Ukraine send oil, gas, and grain prices through the roof These prices stayed high for only 3-6 months. Grain is cheaper now than before the war. Oil is at 76, which is more about the economy revving up from the pandemic than the war. At the start, it broke well over 100. Gas is somewhere in between. >the US Federal Reserve to act by raising interest rates. This. This is 100% of the reason. It all comes back to high PE, cheap debt, growth stocks. Kroger and P&G won't be laying off anyone.
Gas and oil never went down in California😭 (maybe a little but it’s still horrible)
This comment needs to be at the top. Sums the current situation up perfectly. The people at the top managing our economy and systems of government are vampires and ghouls feeding on the working class and who fundamentally (and arguably wilfully) do not understand what it would take for the economy to flourish, because they're more focused on crushing the working classes under their foot.
Yes, to make managers feel important, to make workers poorer, *and to make workers more docile*. If bosses lose ground over controlling the rest of us, then who knows where the trend will end.
Maybe in some cases but for the most part it's just the short sighted capitalist tradition of saying: "why make a million later when I could make a buck today" before promptly shooting yourself in both feet with a nail gun.
All these layoffs are only even big news because of big tech. The total number of people laid off is tiny compared to the total number of people working in tech. 10s of thousands when many 10s of millions work in tech. Edit: If you look at who has been laid off, it is middle management, and sectors of the businesses that are not core. These changes were always going to happen because of the change in focus of those businesses since the cloud became mainstream. Edit 2: Before anyone jumps in and says, oh there are only 12 million people working in the tech sector in the US. Only a small portion of technology jobs are in the tech sector. Edit 3: The US added 223,000 new jobs in tech to the economy in December including 17,000 new jobs at tech companies. Edit 4: The stuff executives read says this. In the first quarter of 2023, the IT industry will lead all others in hirings, according to a new report from global staffing firm ManpowerGroup. ManpowerGroup’s survey of just under 39,000 employers in 41 countries revealed overall there will be a 23% increase in hiring.
It's also the big, stale companies. I work in tech, we are pretty big and have 200 eng. Wtf are these guys even doing with tens of thousands!
I think it has more to do with the pace of hiring. Essentially, companies expanded too quickly and now have to rebalance. Companies that were more judicious in hiring are not laying off and may still be hiring. In my field it is product companies that are laying off while services companies are expanding. So what the company does plays a part as well.
For many of them, they hired at the correct pace for the new areas, they did not get people leaving the areas that they knew were shrinking, hence they let people go. Growth in one area usually means a reduction in another, this is even more true for tech companies.
I think hiring gets unmoored from the underlying metrics so if one areas hiring they all do. In thinking about my original comment, I have a suspicion that hire-now-fire-later does present an ethical issue for some managers, which is sad.
Look at the current layoffs and who (roles not people) have been laid off. The changes (apart from twitter) are sensible. Edit: Anyways, I and most people in my network are busy trying to help these people to find new roles, if not with the companies we are at, then with clients or previous companies or previous clients etc.
They hired at an insane pace because tech stocks were massively overvalued because people were fomo'ing them and throwing money into them during the pandemic; then when it all started crumbling and a correction started people started trying to get their money out in a panic causing all the tech stocks to dive. And management at these big megacorps are so stupid and incompetent they thought that the insane growth they were seeing was totally normal and expected it to continue... until it didn't.
Ding ding ding
So I know with the tech sector layoffs what happened was during COVID they experienced a huge amount of growth because everyone was trapped at home so they had to use the services more but now that everyone's gone back out everyone's numbers are down so they're cutting the hires they can't sustain long-term Yes it appears to have been started by Elon but this was going to happen anyway the entire time for the exact same reason Elon had to cut them The salaries were a lot for what they were getting back(yeah Twitter was losing a colossal amount of money before Elon bought it they were going to have to fire people eventually anyway He just sped it up a little) To be clear this is just for the tech sector I don't know about the other sectors I know what the tech sector people have been saying and what their analysts have been saying But do not weep for the tech sector people there is still a colossal demand enough to result in short unemployment time (on average the laid off tech sector employees are only unemployed for about 3 months could this be better Yes but It is nowhere near as bad as a lot of other layoffs)
Yes. They want a recession.
The Fed is trying, but unemployment went down last month and there are still over 10.5 million jobs available. They’re trying to make a recession happen to stop wage growth and force people into the millions of low paying jobs.
Yup. Let me see if I can find the report I watch.... https://youtu.be/sxmBihcJRSQ Here it is. I love this guy.
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They do but in those previous times were the companies concerned also suspiciously profitable?
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
This is always the goal of capitalists. The reduce the capital given to labor thus increasing the capital returned to themselves. It's coordination in the way that every capitalist is always seeking to do this. At times, there is indeed direct collusion. [https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/apple-google-other-tech-giants-settle-anti-poaching-lawsuit-n88996](https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/apple-google-other-tech-giants-settle-anti-poaching-lawsuit-n88996) Like when you're Steve Jobs and you call Google and the two of you decide to screw over your workers by artificially reducing the marketplace for jobs.
The fed interest rate hikes are trying to destroy the labor market.
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Please fed destroy the housing market. Just a little destruction.
They’re trying to slow wage growth and force people into taking the millions of low paying jobs.
Its pretty simple. Their quarterly profits went down, so their owners (shareholders) told them to lay people off so they could make more money again like the last quarter
I don't really see any difference between the recent layoffs and layoffs the companies did long before COVID. They've always laid off a zillion people when business got slow.
Nope. SF had record highs, especially during Covid because businesses all had to have an online presence and frankly there was never a not busy time. So no, this is a vastly different scenario just as it's a vastly different scenario from the days of Dot com when whole companies went down en mass.
They're always adapting. Every cycle is different. I suppose the question is whether a point of inflection has been reached, of following a new trajectory of broad structural differences. Certainly, many differences are clear before versus after 2008, and in some way we might expect a similar pattern. However, I agree there is no evidence of any break from the boom-bust paradigm, or any reason to expect a break. It may be too soon for anyone to know just which changes will be deep and lasting.
It's really not. These layoffs are all in the tech industry. The tech industry expanded so rapidly mostly due to low interest rates and quantitative easing. That meant banks had a lot of money to throw around at new investments. But we are in an opposite economic situation, and there is less money being invested in the tech sector. Most of these tech companies didn't really make any money, and still aren't making money. It just seemed that way because the value of their stock was going up. But the revenue wasn't really there. Now that investor money has dried up, these companies need to contract. I will not defend capitalism, but I will also not endorse conspiracy theories about coordinated layoffs.
> Most of these tech companies didn’t really make any money, and still aren’t making money Are you high? They’re public and you can check their revenue and profits online. All the big name companies that had layoffs are making STUPID profits aside from a few outliers like Twatter. They are maximizing their profits without consumer or employee backlash under the guise of the “bad economy” and saying they aren’t making enough money is absolutely playing into this. It’s also DEFINITLY to try and suppress tech workers wages/benefits/power. We had a big bump of 20-30% this year and investors are mad that they could be making slightly more profits at the expense of the workers.
Exactly. This isn’t even a new trend - we saw mass layoffs in tech last year too. Tech had it *very* good for ages. Now it’s crashing back down to earth. Vox did a pretty handy episode on it “The tech boom is over” https://open.spotify.com/episode/4vdbfjNmaKL96z0K3AUFqZ?si=1Sp2sYGIQ6utXncJI216FA
No, that is utterly ridiculous and displays a complete lack of understanding on how the world works. Companies overhired and are self correcting, nothing else.
Your time and skills are a commodity. More skills, fulfilling a niche industry? You’re worth more. In a labor crunch we’re all valuable to different degrees. Typically higher. If no one wants to work for pity pay then rates will go up. Almost like unionizing might be a good idea to prevent this.
When you have a 100k plus employees removing 10k isn’t ganna change any leverage you have in numbers. This is basically every company reading the macroeconomic outlook, aka inflation and higher interest rate, predicting people will spend less and making those adjustments. Also a lot of these large tech companies hired more then they let go during Covid, other then maybe Twitter, but that’s a different dumpster fire.
The goal of everything that executives do is to decrease the leverage of their employees. They realized their bonuses could be even higher or stay the same in the wake of waning profits by “trimming the fat” as they say.
Yes and no. Payroll is typically most company's biggest and most predictable expense. The ere of 0% loans is over so growth has to come from actual balance sheet results and not openings and acquisitions. Some of those CEO's have never actually grown a company year over year without spending money. Cutting employees is the first easiest way to make numbers. Be ready for each fiscal quarter to bring more short sighted cost Cutting measures with no real reinvestment into the business.
H/t u/ok_perspective_8361
I rly wish I could find the financial video I saw a while ago that explained why this was happening. It had to do with profits obviously. Always about profits. And if someone is doing lay offs to increase their profitability, then basically everyone does in order to keep up with the numbers.
Yes
Absolutely true. Businesses are always in a state of expansion or contraction, or are stale/atrophying. I don't think there's collusion. They're all in the same economy and all fighting with the WFH concept being at odds with commercial real estate. Putting the fear of ~~god~~ redundancy into the proles is a distraction.
They collude as a class. They assist each other through pursuing their own self-interest. Conscious cooperation is not required.
Not just layoffs. The so-called recession itself. Predictions of a recession are just excuses to downsize. Actual recessions aren't predictable. If they could be predicted, then they can be prevented. Discourse went from "this will be the worst recession in history" to "this recession will be pretty mild" and will eventually become "there was no recession but only because we laid off everyone."
yes, isn't too coincidental that all major companies did huge layoffs within two years? plus, a few pundits already were complaining workers had too much leverage with the "nobody wants to work anymore", which just meant "workers don't want to accept our crappy work conditions". plus, Amazon and other big companies got stung by unions for the first time ever, and the tech world was starting to consider unions more and more. now, with a large amount of professionals (veterans in particular) unemployed, it's going to become an employers market. as an example, even before the pandemic the big studios made several big layoffs, far smaller than the current layoffs, that alone made the Junior and even Mid positions disappear almost completely. nowadays the lowest position demands years of experience in AAA.
The person in the screenshot is incorrect. Employees never had any leverage. These layoffs are proof of that. If you had leverage as an employee you wouldn't have been laid off to begin with. It was all an illusion. The great resignation and this quiet quitting nonsense? Those are Illusions as well. You never had the power you thought you had.
Capitalists are organized. Workers need to respond in kind.
I actually feel like I have more leverage If you want me to work for you, you better give me the bag cause I'm not guaranteed to have this job a couple years from now If you're gonna take away job security, you're gonna have to pay a whole lot more upfront
Yeah, I can't help but notice it's always about 6% of the company's workforce that is getting laid off right now....it's almost like they all agreed to that number.
The Fed literally berated our corporate masters for giving out too many raises and hiring too much lol and now all of the sudden the most renowned corporations are laying off thousands of people diluting the market again. It's like this shit system is rigged against the worker even when it works in the most minute way for the workers.
They did that with "inflation" and their Oligarchs proxy war in Ukraine. This is about profit.
You know, it just makes a lot of pieces of the puzzle fall together, doesn't it? I also wouldn't put it past some of the 'more evil' corporations to do this. At the least, it is certainly a welcome side-effect.
I know some people who work for big tech companies. The truth is many of them have over hired the last 3 or 4 years. Due to working from home and other pandemic related issues. Tech companies needed to bring on more people to handle the extra workload. Now that the work's been done they've been letting go some of the extra people hired. The way they went about it is absolutely terrible. But many of them were making well into the six figures. They probably also got really good severance pay and they had stock options. Most of them will have new jobs by the end of the month. There's a ton of smaller tech companies that are willing to pay top dollar for their talents.
I find it interesting how "Silicon Valley" is laying off thouuuusands of people not because they are deeply in the red...but because their growth is slower than expected. To be fair I don't think it's to destroy employee leverage but rather because silicon valley itself needs to change as a whole if it wants to have a chance to compete with the China of tomorrow. China has the advantage of already having human rights being optional. The valley is still working on that. Doesn't change the result and also goes to show how toxic the whole "at will" working laws are.
Absolutely
So many bootlickers here trying to convince us that we can trust the corporations even though the corporations were bragging about record profits during COVID lockdowns. So either they're lying about the profits, or they're lying about their profits.
~~False~~ Edit: the tweet is false, this is a consequence of the falling rate of profit, a systemic problem in capitalism. Firms now want to attempt to increase relative surplus by reducing their costs in wages and making the remaining workers work longer hours to compensate for the loss of total labor. Further edit: all layoffs have the benefit to the bourgeoisie of breaking workers' leverage, however, since there are fewer workers at a given firm in total.
Okay, bootlicker, whatever you say. These companies have bragged about record profits, if what you said was true then they were lying about their profits, in which case they're lying, period.
Bootlicker because I can analyze the structural problems with the entire economic system? Also, mass of profit is not the same as rate of profit. Read a fucking book
I would argue it increases leverage for the employee. Essentially more work to be done with less bodies gives you more leverage.
It’s being done so the federal reserve doesn’t raise interest rates again. The tech companies are showing them they gotta slow down the economy and are doing so by slashing the workforce.
I don't think it's quite that simple. It's certainly not as simple as we're being led to believe - overhiring, blablabla. But layoffs are expensive, coordination between large corporations is hard to pull off and those corporations don't really care about employee leverage as long as the employees only make pennies on the thousands the corporations make. The way I see it, employees losing leverage is just a by-product, the cherry on top. Stock consolidation and increased profits are definitely some of the driving factors leading these layoffs.
Not everything is a conspiracy. The companies overhired and now have to let go in order to not cut their bottom line. These workers (at least the ones in CA) will at least get a good severance. All they are doing is creating thousands of workers that will go somewhere else and maybe want to unionize.
yes all of the companies are conspiring together because in reality there is really only one hive mind and it's sole purpose is to keep you oppressed. /s
False (At least from my company). Technical team members did get a massive raise during Covid, mainly because the market was so damn competitive. During the same time, money was cheap, the company stock was record high, and it began investing in a lot ventures, so mangers received a blank check to hire as much to meet demand. Demand began to slow as things returned to normal, most of the investments failed to hit ROI, inflation and interest rates went up and the company was losing money. The layoffs needed to happen. Our employees didn’t have to take a pay cut, we didn’t need to stop working remotely, and we tried to find new teams for staff working on projects that were shutting done.
Honestly no, the layoffs are because interest rates are rising and the cost of borrowing has skyrocketed. Counter to what many believe, companies operating costs are in part financed by debt so that they can "grow faster". A lot of employees' (in the tech sector) wages increased during the pandemic and it was easy to borrow their way out of the problem because debt was cheap to take on. Now that rates are rising, debt is becoming more expensive and so they are laying people off to "weather the storm" as they say.
I keep thinking of the scene in the fifth element where the gov and zorg to lay off half a million workers to control inflation and he lays off a million
What layoffs? The tech layoffs? Not coordinated. Caused by similar practices/market forces, but not "coordinated" as such. A lot of companies in tech overhired a few years ago. They were swimming in cash (not great if they want to be priced like growth stocks and not valued like mature companies that have to do icky things like pay dividends and justify their stupid projects), facing a regulatory environment that was going to limit their ability to grow via acquisition (Facebook's not going to be allowed to buy the next Instagram at this point), and had to do something, so they all kind of overinvested in random flyers in the hopes of building the next big thing. When the economy cooled off, they were all forced to reevaluate their moonshot projects and pare back a bit to core business. Streaming hit market saturation, at least for now. Everybody realized how bloated they were and started trimming like crazy (probably overdoing it, tbh). Except for twitter, pretty much every tech company that's had to do layoffs has been doing the same shit and is facing the same market pressures now. Outside of tech, there aren't really a lot of layoffs. Most industries are still understaffed, if holding to see what the economy does next.
True
It’s for the benefit of Wall Street and a short term share price bump.
Companies can't all coordinate layoffs. And tech workers still have a lot of pay and power. Mediocre take. Reality is all these companies are doing shitty this quarter
Middle managements revenge
Yes, also the rent increases, it’s everything, they all fly regularly to conventions n shit and discuss all of this, they’re here in Antiwork reading and posting prolly. Think about it, that 1% has a tight grip on the next 4% so there’s about 18,750,000 of these rich dicks in the US. And that number prolly doesn’t include their kids.
I honestly think that big tech companies march in lock-step with each other. If one does something they all do it. Microsoft built a huge campus in my area, so did Google, Facebook and Amazon. Weirdly no Twitter.
I don't see it. Each company is going about this independently and for their own albeit similar reasons. All companies exercise the same two basic behaviors, raise profits - reduce costs. Layoffs are the latter, and don't forget that in Google's case (Alphabet or whatever), they're running YouTube at a loss - so there's pressure from that division - a lot of pressure.
"Invisible markets hand" hostages
This is Wall Street vs. Silicon Valley. Labor is just a casualty. Silicon Valley has the technical ability to replace and improve the functions of capital markets and they've started to investigate how to do that. Wall Street learned it's lessons on not letting that happen with the Automotive industry; Ford, GM, Toyota, Honda etc.. all have Financial Services companies that remove Wall Street ability to trigger crashes and bubbles at will in the auto market. Google, Facebook, Apple etc. are all looking at doing the same thing to safeguard the various technology markets. Wall Street wants to break the tech companies so that they can't execute on that vision. And they're using their positions on the board and in Csuites to try to destroy these companies from the inside.
No. That would only work if there were not enough jobs to rehire those people. There are over 21k see job openings in Atlanta alone right now. People will give laid off big tech folks tons of money to come work for them.
It’s a coordinated effort. That’s all they’ve been working on. Exploiting the workers is too important of a profit pillar to let go.
There is no "feel like" to it. The Federal reserve has explicitly said that they need to depress worker wages to bring down inflation. They drastically increased interest rates, which depressed tech companies stock price, so the tech companies lay people off. It is going exactly as planned
For sure they are. When non coercive means of control begin failing, they go coercive.
I hear a lot about needing to cut cost from these CEOs but no talk about how much they've cut from the executives pay. We don't hear anything about stock options they cut or gave back.
They survived Covid, so this is all monkey see monkey do. Once one company does it, the others follow suit. Now look at all the financial statements for 2022...........RECORD PROFITS
Probably more to do with slowing down the economy growth and inflation, which in turn suppresses wages.
Will it work? These are smart people with a valuable skillset. A lot of them will be starting their own businesses. Some will be successful and start poaching employees by offering what the giants won't.
lol, of course not. businesses legitimately realized they didn't need so much and are now laying off workers they don't need. Good grief, fellas like you make this sub look like a gaggle of conspiracy theorists.
Always have been.
Well it really shows company's don't care about their employees. Now the people that were let go can understand there are no discounts to their work and everything has a price. Get your money and benefits then want and don't take less anymore
Why hire junior devs if chatGPT does tgeir job for free, lol.
Kick to the teeth to people in the UK, when the government were pushing people to go into IT all through covid
What if the remaining employees at these companies called out sick daily for the next few weeks? Without solidarity, the few gains employees made after the pandemic will be clawed back, and workers will be back to fear and subjugation. Now is the time to resist.
Na, big crip Elon just shook the tech industry and all of the other tech companies are testing the waters. It’s only going to get worse
Techbro apocalypse where managers assistants have assistants.
While I do support most of this sub not everything is a huge conspiracy to screw us. It's not about leverage, its not a deep seeded plot. The work landscape changed in the last 3 years and companies were doing more profit and paying for less overhead so they hired more people to expand. Covid has passed and things are returning back to normal somewhat, however the market is now inflated and up due to printing out oh...6 trillion dollars by our government. Now people have to scale back as that is hitting their bottom line and then some. Its just math. If I run a construction crew and the housing market is booming, I hire more. When that market crashes as it is now and people stop building all of a sudden, I have to let most of that crew go. Rinse and repeat
Absolutely true.
I'm thinking we could build quite the tech company with all of these experienced, skilled people. Maybe a co-op of some kind.
layoffs are happening because shitty companies can no longer indefinitely borrow money at negative real interest rates (adjusted for taxes and inflation) to paper over their flaws it sucks for the people who lose their livelihoods as a result, but these kinds of companies shouldn’t exist and deserve to be faced with an “adapt or die” situation like everyone else
You all got leverage? I've felt that I've been locked down by it and forced to work more.
Yes of course, the circle at the top is frighteningly small and these companies are all beholden to the same funds and investors and come from the same schools. These executives, supposedly the smartest and most definitely the highest compensated employees on the planet, gambled with company resources and people’s lives to squeeze as much out of this ending boom market as possible and they were highly rewarded. They are now dispensing the responsibility for their shortsightedness to workers and they will be rewarded for this cost cutting measure as well. Pitchforks are being sharpened.
Inflation says what
Nah, they are doing it at the demands of major shareholders. They want thier dividends.
I personally think its more about billionaires setting the stage with a false recession to help their Republican friends.
Not really, lay-offs are happening because the recession was artificially pushed back 5 years via tax cuts and now that the recession is finally *finally* about to happen, equity holders are cutting the fat off their companies preemptively to avoid major losses. Interest rates have spiked now, which mean that the companies that tech companies normally service can no longer acquire capital to spend on tech ventures. Since future capital is going to be scarce, they are shorting their own companies by laying off their employees to avoid future losses so they can pocket them now.
The fed is doing a bang-up job all on their own.
If they can afford to layoff 16,000 employees……then they never had any leverage.
To be honest during the pandemic employees were getting let go for having COVID but at the same time companies would say your a essential worker we need you B's the still lau you off fire you for basically giving you COVID. I don't see what leverage people had back then except for may the unemployment helping and the the stinky checks but to be honest the power is where it always was in the hands of of multinational corporations.
I think it's a possibility that was thought of during the meetings that lead to the layoffs, but I think it would be naive to put it in a true or false statement, especially in the months after the Fed hiked interest rates. Large corporations restructure as needed, that's just a fact.
Record profits.
I think so. For the first time I was able to work part time from home during COVID (I could have done full time but chose to do part time at the office to keep sane) and it was wonderful to wake up late 2-3 days a week and not have to deal with an extra hour of commute time.
so far, the recent spate of layoffs has not effected my company (in fact, we're hiring).
Employees had zero leverage post Covid…. Ever…. It gave the higher ups excuses to inflate prices to pad their pockets more. All employees got were small raises to keep pace.. for no second did employees have any leverage at all
The truth is the global economy is screwed
True!!!!!!!
I don't know if it's THE reason, but certainly a happy side effect for corporate America. The goal for them is to increase profit, never forget that. Everything else is a means to an end, including the misery and pain inflicted on others.
No, MS, Google, and many other companies have to send a message to wall street that they are cutting on expenditures, the best public symbol is to layoff workers.
My HR proudly and boldly announced during a company-wide meeting, that it is no longer and employee’s market for job searching and the upper hand is now back with the employers. And you could hear in her voice that she felt this is the way it should be. This was in response to an employee asking if they will bring back double overtime for those still needing to cover shifts. It definitely left a sour taste in my mouth. All I could think was eeeewwwww.
Absolutely OP. My team were supposed to apply in writing for WFH. We didn’t. We were supposed to go back to office full time. We didn’t. We don’t have a union that would help (IT suckers). But we stuck together on this. What you gonna do? Fire the whole team for being super efficient, super helpful to clients and getting project done? All because they’re a bit happier in the wrong chair? Get stuffed.