The latest wave of mass layoffs is affecting tech workers across the industry. So far this year, according to Layoffs.fyi, more than 137,500 tech workers have been laid off by over 400 companies worldwide, while another tracker puts the number at over 215,402 laid off in the technology sector, according to TrueUp.
On August 1, Intel announced a massive downsizing round, eliminating 15 percent of its workforce as part of a “cost savings plan” for 2025. This could affect anywhere from 15,000 to 19,000 workers. At the end of August, Apple announced plans to cut 100 jobs in their Online Services group, citing a “shift in priorities”.
In mid-September, IT hardware company Cisco announced it was laying off 5,600 workers, or roughly 7 percent of its workforce, while Microsoft reported letting go of 650 employees in their Xbox division. Most recently, IBM announced plans to close an entire research and development division in China, resulting in 1,000 additional layoffs for 2024.
Amazon has made two major announcements recently. The first one was regarding a mandatory return to office for five-days-a-week scheduling starting January 2025 for all corporate workers.
The next day, it announced the letting go of an undisclosed number of managers in order to “strengthen the culture of the company,” the new CEO of the company Andy Jassy declared. The exact amount is yet to be known, but the reported objective is to increase the ratio of employees to managers by at least 15 percent by the end of the first quarter of 2025.
Tech workers took to social media and other forums to express their anger over these various announcements.
On the anonymous employee social platform Blind, one worker at Meta said, “Companies are doing sneaky layoffs now. Meta is regularly doing little layoffs at an individual organization level so that they don’t have to make public announcements.
“They’ve turned up underperformance quotas and are terminating people in the name of performance. Google said it will also continuously keep doing small layoffs wherever they see an opportunity. Amazon is forcing some people to quit by forcing five day work from the office and reducing flexibility.”
This forced return-to-office policy comes amid an ongoing and very active COVID-19 pandemic surge. In the US, the summer wave has been particularly virulent, with numbers reaching up to 1.5 million cases a day in August. Updated vaccines availability are still very limited, and mitigation protocols have long been dropped, if not prohibited, as demonstrated by the recent wave of states passing, or attempting to pass, anti-mask legislation.
Forcing workers to return to an office full time will create the conditions for additional waves of infection, therefore increasing the risk of the development of new variants. The ruling class is openly embracing the policy of “forever Covid” and the mass disabling of the working class, as another tool to subjugate workers to the imperialist interests manifesting themselves in the escalation of war in the Middle East and Ukraine.
Hundreds of thousands have lost their jobs in the tech sector since 2022 as part of a ruling class counteroffensive against demands for higher wages by workers. This was the outcome of a conscious ruling class policy led by the Biden administration and the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates in order to drive up unemployment and drive down wages.
This year began with Google’s mass layoffs of over 12,000 workers, as part of an industry-wide cost-cutting frenzy, aimed at bolstering stock prices and appeasing Wall Street. Despite posting record profits, Google, like Apple, Dell, and IBM, made a calculated decision to prioritize profit margins over the livelihoods of its workers.
The layoffs in tech and other sectors have been driven not by financial necessity, but by the unrelenting pressure from hedge funds, investment firms and billionaires to drive up corporate valuations through “restructuring” measures, i.e., the destruction of jobs.
Whether in times of crisis or growth, it is the working class that shoulders the cost while the wealthy continue to accumulate obscene levels of wealth.
The working class, in particular, has been a central target of the ruling class attacks on jobs, especially among auto workers who have seen thousands of jobs slashed in the United States, Europe, Asia and internationally.
Just this year alone, the automotive company Stellantis announced it would slash over 2,500 workers at its Stellantis Warren Truck plant in Michigan, along with plans to cut over 25,000 jobs in Italy. The rest of the Big Three are also carrying out a massive attack on jobs as they prepare to transition the auto industry to electric vehicles and impose the cost of the transition on the working class.
The ruling class, aided by their media outlets, are quick to promote “upskilling” as one solution to this crisis. Workers are encouraged to constantly retrain and adapt to new technologies in order to remain “relevant” in an increasingly ruthless job market.
The focus on upskilling shifts the blame for layoffs onto workers, suggesting that their obsolescence is due to an individual failure to keep up with technological advances, rather than the inherent logic of capitalism.
Highly educated and skilled workers are increasingly treated as disposable, while the wealth generated by the labor of the working class as a whole is concentrated in the hands of a shrinking elite. The wealth of tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook soared even during the pandemic, while millions of workers faced job losses, pay cuts and evictions.
The tech industry, once seen as a career offering higher paying jobs for higher skills, is now undergoing the same process of consolidation, cost-cutting, and financialization that has ravaged other industries for decades, especially with the new advances in artificial intelligence. This trend is driven by the same underlying processes that have shaped the global economy under capitalism: the drive to maximize profits, often at the expense of long-term growth, stability and workers’ rights.
The layoffs in the tech sector is the result of this dynamic. Technology is advancing, but instead of benefiting the working class, it is being weaponized to destroy jobs and deepen inequality.
A recent report by ZipRecruiter found that every industry, from retail to manufacturing has now seen massive cuts to wages. The biggest was in retail where average posted pay decreased by 55.9 percent, while manufacturing was down by 17.3 percent.
Another report by the Wall Street Journal titled “Bosses Are Finding Ways to Pay Workers Less” noted that companies are seeking to reduce labor costs by moving from the US to parts of the world where labor costs are cheaper, like Mexico or Eastern Europe. In the US, the WSJ report noted, companies are moving software jobs from cities like San Francisco and Chicago to lower cost cities in what industry experts are citing as “geographic arbitrage.”
The mass layoffs in the tech sector and the attacks on jobs and wages in other industries by the ruling class must be met with a counteroffensive of the working class to assert its right to a job. The working class, including technology workers, must recognize that their interests are irreconcilably opposed to those of the corporate elite.
Instead of the advances of technology, including in artificial intelligence and automation, being used against workers and enriching a tiny handful of billionaires, the gains of technological progress must be used to reduce the burden of labor, shorten the workweek and improve the standard of living for the vast majority of working people.
