For two months placement firms like the veteran Challenger, Gray & Christmas have been reporting rising mass layoffs by U.S.-based companies, with headlines like this one in the Business Journals: “‘No One’s Hiding from This’: Small Companies, Biotechs Impacted by National Wave of Tech Layoffs.” At the start of November, recession really began to hit. Facebook stopped hiring and began laying off 11,000 workers, 13% of its workforce. In late October Microsoft laid off 1,000 and Google announced likely layoffs of 2,200. Six other more or less well-known tech companies are laying off between 5% and 50% (Twitter) of their employees. TechWire totaled up 137,000 layoffs in 2022 at tech giants and startups combined, most in September and October. Some context in production for all this was provided by the Wall Street Journal’s report July 12 that worldwide shipment of personal computers was 12.6% lower in the second quarter than in the same period of 2021, and global electronic device shipments fell 15.3%, according to research firms Gartner, Inc. and International Data Corp. So top semiconductor maker Intel has now begun a workforce reduction, expected to axe 22,000 jobs.
On Wall Street, Goldman Sachs laid off hundreds of employees in September; Citigroup, Barclays and Morgan Stanley have all begun laying off traders and “advisory personnel.”
In transportation, the little-known but very large “truck brokerage” firm C.H. Robinson Worldwide Inc. will lay off 1,200 workers in November, 650 of whom have already lost their jobs, according to FreightWaves industrial news agency on Nov. 9.
