Layoffs are not always a result of declining performance. We have seen several now where quarterly results point to increased performance but layoffs still occur as an opportunity to dump workers without much criticism.
Exactly this, though I also propose as the end of your sentence, "...as CEOs and investors claim." We get told a lot of false or true-but-in-the-abstract motives.
The McSweeney's article[0] nails it perfectly for me. I am in the gap in the middle, where stable pensions were on the way out at the same time as companies dropped loyalty to employees into the bin. So I started my working life with the cultural expectation that existed--work for the same company, or maybe two companies, for 40ish years, then leave the workforce knowing I'd be stable--and am now expected to cover all of my years of life solely from the resources I can scrounge together. This, in a word, sucks, and it's part of why layoffs--especially when companies are still hiring in other areas is so jarring to me.
(Does it suck more than the generation or two who have come after me, who had neither the expectation of a pension or potential job stability? No! It's far worse for those later than me; their only "benefit" is people younger than me didn't start out with that false hope. They've always known they're screwed unless they can horde as much as possible in as little time as possible.)
0 - https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/macroeconomic-changes-ha...
But I hate that I have this mindset. It’s useful to a degree but it’s almost become a compulsion for me. Incidentally, I think this is the main reason why my home country has the lowest birth rate in the world. I really wish we could all just, enjoy life without having to worry about poverty in the future.
(My home country is South Korea)
In hindsight those stable pensions were actually extremely immoral in a way. They allowed for a demographic moment where a large portion of workers consumed everything they produced with too little saving while supporting a much smaller number of retired and simultaneously telling themselves the next generation would pay for their retirement needs.
Well as 1 millennial all I can say is fuck that. I didn't sign up to support your prolifigacy in your youth and have no intention of doing so (to the best of my ability).
If you want a stable pension alongside an often decades long retirement, then start saving when you're young or have a lot of children to support you.
I just want to point out that you're largely proving my point. I got started on saving later in my career because the first few years were spent laboring under the idea that pensions existed. (The 401k was rolled out after I got my first job, for example.)
We had the rug pulled, and there are a lot of GenX people who are going to be in a lot worse situation than me, someone who was lucky enough to get into a high-paying career and stay there (that is, I've never been laid off..so far) and deliberately did not have many children or take vacations or have lucked into not getting sick.
We are both in the same boat; you just have the "advantage", useless for anything it is, of never having thought you were on land.
If by "We had the rug pulled" you mean "the people we intended to force to pay for our pensions said 'no thanks'" then I agree.
I get why you may be upset how it played out because I agree that spending all your money your whole life then forcing other people to pay for your retirement is a sweet deal. But as one of the people who was expected to be paying, I'm sure you'll understand why I'm not particularly sympathetic.
But you've fallen hook, line and sinker for the story purposefully seeded by the wealth class (the real wealth class, not the 6-figure salary FAANG 'wealth') to cause the middle class to go to war with each other instead of waging war against their real common enemy.
So well done, hope you enjoy being bent over by the wealth class your whole life because that's what is in store for you.
They guaranteed above-market returns based off of the same ever-increasing-pool math that screwed up social security. Why do you think they’re essentially nonexistent now?
Pensions are nonexistent now because other compensation packages have become the norm. Actuarial regulation has changed to incorporate lessons learned from pension fund failures. The goal of the regulatory changes is to decrease risk to consumers in contemporary actuarial products.
That’s about as deep as I can go on this topic. I’m not an actuary, by a number of my friends are and actuaries talk about lessons learned from failed pensions like engineers talk about lessons learned from failed software development projects. Evidently, demonstrating knowledge of those failures and the resulting controls is a key element of earning the title of professional actuary.
The main difference between car loans and pensions is the time horizon. It’s much simpler to manage the risk of a 3-5 year loan than a 30+ year retirement that begins 45 years in the future.
They are gone because of a conscious choice, manifested through tax policy, to transfer risk from capital to workers. (To the extent changing demographics would have impacted them in any case, it would have reduced the pension amounts.)
Pensions have failed because they were mismanaged. They are not “Ponzi schemes”.
> "impractical rate of return” is one element of “mismanaged”
If people could dependably and quickly find new employment after being laid off, with a 100% income replacement safety net for short-term frictional unemployment, getting laid off wouldn't be so stressful and thus wouldn't be as harmful to society.
To solution isn't to slow everything down (by making it more difficult to lay people off) but to speed everything up (reduce the personal consequences of getting laid off).
True, but Google search revenue was down 2% YoY. Youtube ad revenue was down 8% YoY. OpEx was up 10%. Google absolutely saw declining performance while on a hiring binge.
But you and I both know that will neve happen lol.