Following last week's announcements by Salesforce, Vimeo and Amazon about laying off thousands of workers, dozens of other companies around the world followed suit and announced massive layoffs.
Advertised positions are not limited to one industry. However, new tech and cryptocurrency companies, as well as major banks such as Goldman Sachs, confirmed their global workforce reductions this week. Job loss will primarily affect white-collar workers, including middle management, but senior management positions are also at stake.
Tech industry layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi reports that so far this year, 82 tech companies worldwide have laid off 23,550 workers. A separate tracker, trueup.io, has reported 29,923 job cuts at 120 tech companies so far this year.
The tech industry has seen record layoffs over the past year. According to data from trueup.io, 237,874 people lost their tech jobs in 2022, while Layoffs.fyi reported that 1,023 tech companies laid off a total of 154,256 employees last year.
Each figure is at least double the number of tech layoffs suffered during the Great Recession, according to data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a global career-changing company based in Chicago. In 2008 and 2009, the company estimated that 65,000 technology workers lost their jobs worldwide each year.
Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek announced in a blog post on Friday that the company will cut "global headcount by about 20%." The Singapore-based company, founded by Marszalek in 2016, employs 2,450 people, according to PitchBook, meaning around 490 employees have been laid off.
Brian Armstrong, the billionaire CEO of US cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, announced last Tuesday that the company would cut a fifth of its global workforce, or about 950 jobs. This is the company's second major round of layoffs in the past year.
Last June, 1,100 workers at the company were laid off. In his post on Tuesday, Armstrong threatened more layoffs, writing, "We may not be done with him."
Referring to the collapse of FTX and the loss of nearly $1.4 trillion in the crypto market by 2022, Armstrong said, “[There will be] another scrutiny of companies in the space to make sure they follow the rules they follow.”
"FTX's subsequent dips and gains have given the industry a black eye," Armstrong added, predicting there would be more "shoe drops."
The end of the loose monetary policy that fueled the growth of the cryptocurrency market has caused the share prices of the remaining major cryptocurrency companies to plummet. CNBC reported this week that Bitcoin shares are down 58% over the past year, while Coinbase shares are down 83%.
Beyond crypto, the layoffs were announced Wednesday by Flexport co-CEOs Ryan Petersen and Dave Clark. In their memo, Petersen and Clark announced that the supply chain software company would lay off 20% of its global workforce, affecting around 640 workers.
Scale AI, an artificial intelligence startup founded in 2016 and valued at $7.3 billion in 2021, announced in a blog post on Monday that it will also be laying off 20% of its workforce.
After raising more than $600 million from institutional investors such as Tiger Global, Dragoneer and Index Ventures, as well as a deal with the US Department of Defense, Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang (25) has been named the "youngest self-made billionaire" in the world by Forbes .
These layoffs, and countless thousands of layoffs, are the result of deliberate class politics instituted by central banks around the world, led by the US Federal Reserve. The increase in interest rates is aimed at boosting the number of unemployed to quell the ever-increasing demands for higher wages for laborers to fight once in a generation and tackle temporary inflation.
The US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine exacerbated supply chain problems. This, combined with rising prices and corporate profitability, has pushed inflation to a decades-high in 2022, according to CPI data released by the US Department of Labor.
While the ministry said the inflation rate for December 2022 was 6.5%, compared with a peak of 9.1% in June 2022, staples such as eggs, butter and margarine, utilities, electricity and white bread remained in double digits.
The Labor Department reported that egg prices rose nearly 60% year-on-year in December 2022. Oil was up 41.5%; White bread increased by 17.7%. Health insurance rose 7.9%, slightly less than the 8.3% year-over-year increase in rents. Total home purchases increased 11.8% from December 2021 to December 2022.
As workers around the world struggle to make ends meet, companies are making it clear that there will be more layoffs. According to a report by The Information , Google parent company Alphabet is preparing to lay off up to 6% of its global workforce, the equivalent of 11,000 job cuts.
Although official figures have yet to be released , a spokesperson for market research giant Nielsen confirmed in an interview with insiderradio.com that this will reduce the company's "total headcount" to what it was "roughly like a year ago". . . , resulting in the loss of hundreds of jobs.
In Britain, British telecommunications giant Vodoafone, which employs around 104,000 people worldwide, including about 9,400 in the UK, said it would cut "hundreds" of jobs at its London headquarters.
Banking giant Goldman Sachs announced earlier this week it would lay off 3,200 bankers worldwide. This is the highest number of layoffs at a bank since the 2008 global financial crisis.
IndianExpress reported Friday that "at least 700 [Goldman Sachs] employees in India" were laid off Wednesday and Thursday, including "several senior executives."
Before the layoffs, InidianExpress reported that the Wall Street bank employed around 9,000 people in offices in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Mumbai. Five laid-off workers who spoke to the Express told the paper they were called to a "quick meeting" earlier this week and had been laid off.
After being fired, the workers said they were prevented from returning to their offices and were immediately escorted out of the building.
“Immediately after being notified of my dismissal, I was ushered out of the building and asked to go home. I couldn't even say goodbye to my friends," a former software engineer from Goldman's Bengaluru office told Express.
Former domestic workers who were fired by the bank were told via Zoom that they no longer had jobs.
Major banks began reporting earnings for the final quarter of 2022. JPMorgan announced this week that it "turned in" $11 billion in profit in its final quarter, up 6% year-over-year.
Speaking to investors this week, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said 2022 was "one of the best years for the bank," with a profit of more than $7 billion reported net in just the fourth quarter.
While Citigroup and Wells Fargo didn't beat last year's numbers, Citigroup still reported fourth-quarter revenue of $2.5 billion, while Wells Fargo reported nearly $3 billion.
In the face of global layoffs, unions around the world have done nothing but adjust to the demands of capital while pushing for cheap contracts over the objections of senior workers.
Socialists reject the so-called capitalist right to close factories, cut wages, and carry out mass layoffs for the good of the "economy", by which the ruling class understands the interests of financial capital.