Except that in the « old » economy, you would be hard pressed to be allowed to fire thousands of people with a P&L showing billions in profit (at least in France).
Americans don't know how bad they have it and don't remember the mass layoffs of the 1980's and 1990's. A time when jobs became scarce because nearly every company was following suit and REAL unemployment, including those who stopped looking for jobs, rose considerably. The REAL labor participation rate in the US is more like 55% rather than 62% due to the rosy and flawed methodology used to count U-1 through U-6. There are millions fewer middle-aged workers now than there were historically. Ageism, discrimination, and other factors discourage workers from seeking to reenter the workforce. Low skill workers have it worst, cannot always move great distances, and cannot always retrain into magical hypothetical jobs that don't exist. Many underemployed people become Uber and Lyft drivers, where there is the perception of freedom but there is net underpayment and abuse (no help with capitalization, depreciation, and maintenance of a vehicle make their effective pay well below that of taxi drivers).
The global situation is the US Fed's fault for giving out free money for years and then suddenly being a Grinch because they don't like "excess consumption" when there have been shortages and supply chain disruptions. US trucking is still a mess.
And raising the retirement age.. and more austerity too?
* For anyone unfamiliar with the term: think corporate "Liberal" (conservative lite) inspired by the American Clinton dynasty including Obama and Biden who are pro-neocolonialism, anti-union, anti-worker, and "tough on crime". Macron's type is sometimes seen as a "palatable compromise" compared to the regressive fascist nationalists like Le Pen.
a lot of us are pretty aware... just powerless to change things en masse.
As a global perspective: American employees tend to lack testicular fortitude because they lack hope, knowledge, and self-worth.
That logic is flawed. Past performance is not indicative of future results. If you see big slowdown coming, isn't it better to prepare for it early? Do you have to wait till you're losing money?
The stock market tanked thanks to the Fed rate hikes. It's believed shareholders will respond positively to cost optimizations. So they'll try to hold the line on growth while boosting margins re cost centers.
It's quite straight-forward thinking as it pertains to getting a positive reaction from shareholders.
The question for that context is: are your cost centers well optimized, or can you trim staff (real-estate holdings, inventory, whatever)? That's a very common question that would be pushed at public companies by large institutional shareholders.
Big tech is extraordinarily bloated with labor. They frequently grow at almost comical rates in terms of adding unnecessary employees (they do it just because they can afford to hoover up the talent to keep it from their competition; one common path forward in the hierarchy for managers is to grow their staff count and expand their footprint), and pretty much everyone knows it. It happens with every fast growth era in tech.
Are there any papers regarding the labor bloat specific to tech? Everyone believing in something doesn't make it true so I would love to read more about that beyond the usual memes of "girls on tiktok posting about their day in tech".
Actually, this idea that it's done because of bloat signals something interesting. The reply above claims these layoffs happen because of the future potentially showing massive slowdown - however, why are we trusting what these companies feel about the future when they got their pandemic move completely wrong? They thoroughly believed (apparently, so they say in their layoff emails...) that this growth was going to continue, so obviously they don't have the best grasp on how to make decisions for the future. Entirely negating the above reply that this is due to impending slowdown.
Sure, they can't achieve those record profits for four years in a row, but none are losing money soon.
The companies that actually grew responsibly (aka not FAANG) are generally doing less/smaller layoffs/none at all.
This new economy was one of extremely low interest rates.