Google has made over 12,000 workers around the world redundant, axing 6% of its workforce. The cuts are a result of tightening budgets in response to what they called “a new economic reality”.
Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., have not only had to deal with the bad press of making so many people redundant, but the added negative feelings for the way it was handled. Employees woke up to find their co-workers all posting about being unemployed on their LinkedIn, or having their logins rejected, due to the fact that they had yet to check their email. There they would find a short email from chief executive Sundar Pichai explaining the situation.
The email, read: “To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today. This will mean saying goodbye to some incredibly talented people we worked hard to hire and have loved working with,” Mr Pichai wrote. “I’m deeply sorry for that.”
“The fact that these changes will impact the lives of Googlers weighs heavily on me, and I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here.”
And Google was just the highest profile of these layoffs, perhaps due to the scandalous nature of how they were executed. There have already been documented mass layoffs from Meta last year, Microsoft has announced 10,000 are to be made redundant a few days ago, not to mention Musk getting rid of a majority of the Twitter team in November 2022. Since then, Vimeo has followed suit by dropping 11% of its employees. Salesforce axed 10% and Amazon is said to be looking to drop 18,000 people.
