LAT: How Big Tech is using mass layoffs to bring workers to heel

[DBoon]

In Silicon Valley, the new year began as the last one ended — with tens of thousands of tech workers losing their jobs. Just a few days into 2023, Amazon Chief Executive Andrew Jassy announced that there would be 18,000 layoffs across the company. Within weeks, Microsoft revealed it was slashing its head count by 10,000 and Google said that it was terminating 12,000 employees. IBM looks to be next, with nearly 4,000 workers on the chopping block.
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“Controlling labor costs via periodic layoffs is like breathing for Silicon Valley: cyclical, necessary for life,” Malcolm Harris, author of the forthcoming book “Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism and the World,” told me. The layoffs, Harris says, have “very little to do with long- or even medium-term strategy except as it pertains to cultivating an insecure workforce.”

That tracks with the economic reality we do face today, as a tech CEO might put it. Because while a recession has not yet arrived in any meaningful form, there is another economic indicator pointing to the desirability of layoffs, from a large employer’s perspective: a growing effort to organize tech workers in an unusually tight labor market.

Tech employees’ salaries have skyrocketed over the last two years, and their bargaining power has begun to grow too. Over the last half-decade, workers in the tech industry have agitated for changes that executives have found increasingly inconvenient.
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The concrete gains won by organizing tech workers so far may be relatively small, but the rising salaries and growing organizing capacity threaten the tech giants’ bottom line and the brand of executive sovereignty that’s prized in Silicon Valley. Elon Musk’s mass firings at Twitter last year, and his public demand that only “hardcore” coders dedicated to his program remain at the company, are instructive here, not least because other tech executives have said his approach was an inspiration when culling jobs at their own companies.

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-01-30/column-how-big-tech-is-using-mass-layoffs-to-bring-workers-to-heel

No paywall link (which also tells you how to lose 52 lbs using one simple trick):

https://vnexplorer.net/column-how-big-tech-is-using-mass-layoffs-to-bring-workers-to-heel-s7526077.html