01/27/2023 / By JD Heyes
The technology sector under Joe Biden’s inflationary economy continues to downsize rapidly, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to rebound any time soon, with Google becoming the latest to announce massive layoffs.
The division of Alphabet announced this week that the company would be laying off 12,000 people, many of them in senior positions or were recently promoted, adding to anger and confusion over the move. That’s about 6 percent of Google’s global workforce.
“While employees had been bracing for a potential layoff, they are questioning leadership about the criteria for layoffs that surprised some employees, who woke up to find their access to company properties cut off. Some of the laid-off employees had been long-tenured or recently promoted,” CNBC reported late last week.
The outlet continued:
Shortly after CEO Sundar Pichai’s initial email to employees Friday morning, Google’s search boss, Prabhakar Raghavan, sent an email to employees saying he also feels “the responsibility to reach out” and asking them to save questions for a town hall scheduled for Monday. There will be “bumps in the road” as the organization moves forward with the layoffs, Raghavan said. So far in the U.S., employees have been laid off across business units including Chrome, Cloud, and its experimental Area 120 unit. Some employees working on the company’s artificial intelligence programs were also laid off, according to Bloomberg.
Questions from confused employees were posted to Dory, the company’s internal question-asking forum, according to CNBC. One of the top-rated questions asked: “How were the layoffs decided? Some high performers were let go from our teams. This negatively impacts the remaining Googlers who see someone with high recognition, positive reviews, promo but still getting laid off.”
“What metrics were used to determine who was laid off?” asked another top question. “Was the decision based on their performance, scope of work, or both, or something else?”
Another asked: “How much runway are we hoping to gain with the layoffs?” as well as, “Would you explain clearly what the layoff allows Google to do that Google could not have done without layoffs?”
Yet another highly rated question quoted a passage from Pichai’s email informing employees about the coming layoffs: “I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here.”
“What does taking full responsibility entail?” the employee asked. “Responsibility without consequence seems like an empty platitude. Is leadership forgoing bonuses and pay raises this year? Will anyone be stepping down?”
Of course, the answer to the latter question is going to be the same at Google as it is at nearly every other Fortune 500 company that is taking a dump this year: No. Just the workers must pay.
“Alphabet leadership claims ‘full responsibility’ for this decision, but that is little comfort to the 12,000 workers who are now without jobs,” Parul Koul, executive chair of Alphabet Workers Union-CWA, noted in a statement Friday. “This is egregious and unacceptable behavior by a company that made $17 billion dollars in profit last quarter alone.”
Meanwhile, CNN reported that tech giants IBM and SAP also announced layoffs this week, totaling thousands more jobs. IBM is cutting some 3,900 positions and SAP another 2,800, the outlet reported.
Earlier, Microsoft announced it would be laying off around 10,000 workers, CNN noted.
“That followed similar plans outlined by Amazon (AMZN) and Salesforce to shed thousands of jobs, with more than 18,000 employees affected at the e-commerce giant alone. The US tech sector, which went on a hiring spree during the pandemic, announced 97,171 job cuts in 2022, a 649% increase on the previous year, according to consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas,” CNN added.
Biden and Democrats overspent and under-invested in our energy sector during the first two years of Biden’s stolen presidency — when supply chains were at their weakest and thus more expensive, driven up in large part by supply-and-demand pressures.
Now the economy is stuck in a major ‘adjustment’ as the Democrats and the president responsible for it escape accountability like the tech industry CEOs.
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401K pensions, Amazon, Biden economy, Bidenflation, democrats, dollar demise, economic collapsee, Google, IBM, inflation, layoffs, Microsoft, overspending, pensions, recession, risk, sap, tech sector
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