Massive spike in unemployment coming soon; layoffs in America hit over 120,000

A massive spike in unemployment is expected soon in the United States as more and more technology workers are being laid off every day. The total number of employees laid off so far this year in the U.S has hit 120,000, which is higher than the number of tech workers sacked during the Dot Com bubble in 2001. Top Wall Street banks have also started slashing jobs to cut costs. Reports say that more job cuts are coming soon.

Corporate America is drastically reducing its workforce as part of its restructuring efforts to prepare for a probable economic downturn brought on by the U.S. Federal Reserve's fight against inflation and the war in Ukraine. The fact that this is only the beginning is troubling.

According to a report in The New York Times on Monday, Amazon is ready to fire up to 10,000 workers mainly in its retail and devices divisions, making the e-commerce behemoth the most recent tech titan to implement a significant redundancy plan. The final number of layoffs could vary, but if true, they would represent the biggest firing in the 28-year-old history of the world's largest e-commerce company founded by Jeff Bezos.



The parent company of Facebook, Meta, said last week that it will eliminate 11,000 positions or around 13 percent of its workforce. This week, the software behemoth Microsoft laid off under 1,000 employees across numerous businesses, according to a source cited by Axios.

Both the car-hailing service Lyft and the online payment company Stripe recently announced significant layoffs. About half of Twitter's 7,500 employees were let go earlier this month after Elon Musk recently acquired the company.

Wall Street firms slash jobs

Apart from technology giants, big Wall Street firms like Citigroup and Goldman Sachs have cut jobs and Morgan Stanley is also planning to slash jobs in the coming months.

According to Johnson Associates Inc, a compensation consultant in New York, bonuses for investment bankers may plunge by 45% in 2022 as compared to 2021.

Some other American companies that have laid off employees are Warner Bros Discovery, Beyond Meat Inc, Stripe Inc, Chime, Opendoor Technologies Inc, Phillips 66, Chesapeake Energy Corp, Seagate Technology Holdings Plc, Arrival SA, Coinbase Global and Walt Disney Co.


Both established tech companies and startups have declared considerable austerity measures.

According to consultancy firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., IT companies have already announced plans to cut 31,200 jobs this month. This figure is the highest since September 2015.

However, economists in the U.S say that tech employees represent only 2% of the workforce and layoffs in the industry are not a broader indicator of the labour market.

Reports coming out of China state that tech titan Tencent has started laying off employees from its gaming, video streaming and cloud divisions.