Ask HN: 1M layoffs soon, should gov intervene?
The cumulative number of layoffs in past two months alone is going to hit 1 million employees. Shouldn't the government intervene to prevent social crisis?
Yeah this might come back to bite them in the arse in the future but from a political point of view it seems unfeasible to do otherwise.
And even then, applying while under H-1B puts you in a difficult position. You don't have that much choice, as your denial might result being out of status. Not to mention that companies might take advantage from it.
After 60 days they need to leave. They MAY get caught, but the USA doesn't actively enforce overstayers on status.
You'll run into problems when you want to re-enter the USA.
And if you wish to stay, you cannot find a (legal) job because your employer needs to fill in an I-9, which will reveal the fact that you are out of status.
obviously if you come to work to foreign country and your visa is tied to job it's only natural it will be void after they fire you and it doesn't mean you can stay as long as you want, I was also kicked out from foreign country after my former employer went extra length to make my life difficult when moving to new company, had to leave country, to get new visa, so I could start new job
Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...
Not dismissing 100k. That's a significant number and I hope everyone will be ok in the end.
- 2022 year - 1044 companies laid off 159786 employees
- 2023 year - 334 companies laid off 101617 employees
For some reason, total sum of laid off employees is displayed as 358224, and even though that does not really match the reported 2022+2023 numbers, I could easily imagine that the actual figure crosses the 0.5M given that 30-40% of the listings are not included in math.
https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2022/the-decline-in-employment...
I fully expect these layoffs will provide necessary labor for the next generation of startups and smaller firms that will drive the future growth, just like dotcom crash did and the financial crisis did.
I don’t know about the social crisis, but if I were the US antitrust I’d take a look at whether a tech sector cartel exists to depress wages.
None of the companies announcing layoffs appear to be struggling financially, in fact the opposite in many case.
So this does have the look of a co-ordinated attempt to reign in wages, albeit very indirectly, and most likely coming from the Fed who have pretty much directly stated this is policy.
Obviously the high wages in tech are an upward drag on all other wages, so it's logical to focus on this area.
If you're looking at it through Keynes's perspective there's not a lot of investment that the highly-paid tech workers actually carry out with their total comps, many of them just save most of it in view of early retirement. According to Keynes that's bad, it's just money left not doing anything in view of the famous accumulation.
Supposedly, the money spent on those very high comps would be better spent by the companies themselves carrying out their own investments, and if not successful in doing that then those companies should return the money to the shareholders so that the latter would carry out their own investments. In either case, there would be higher chances of accumulation.
Investment rates and savings rates go hand in hand, and taking money from the upper middle class to give to the investor class is not sound economic policy. Savings don't depress investments, on the contrary they reduce capital costs and allow for more investment without inflation. Banks don't actually keep your money on hand, they lend almost all of it out.
I don't know Keynes well enough to know if your take on his work is valid, but I do know that parts of his theories were found lacking 50 years ago in the last bout of stagflation.
The upper middle class at most is investing their money in index funds, gone are the days of angel investors who had made their money from Google comps. For the sake of argument, they're putting their money in the 2% investment funds.
The "investor class", supposedly, is putting their money in higher-risk but also in higher-reward vehicles/entities, let's say entities that get them a 5% ROI. That 5% > 2% has been the essence of capitalism development ever since the industrial revolution got going, i.e. we haven't gotten to this point by playing it safe and putting our past money in the 2% financial vehicles.
It seems to me that is much better than 'investing' aka buying ownership of people's work.
I mean, unless there's continual 'investment', someone has to actually pay for the work people do at some point, not just keep buying/paying for ownership of the work/profits they make.
All it did is kick a can down the road and allow a bunch of dishonest players to scoop the cream off the top.
proof please.
According to layoffs.fyi, 2022+ytd 2023 is <260k. That’s 20k a month tops, 2 orders of magnitude off.
According to bls, here are the unemployment numbers by month. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t10.htm
2 - "Shouldn't the government intervene to prevent social crisis?" - Despite warning from people like Hayke and Mises, people tried to do all sorts of state-controlled economies (Germany, USSR, modern USA, etc). It didn't work. Better to drink lots of water, take a rest, and not get drunk next time.
It DID intervene. That's why we have the layoffs now.
But maybe the govt can hire these people to improve a bunch of the aging software we have.
Pay them a decent salary + pension.