Ever since Margaret Thatcher famously claimed, “There is No Alternative,” mass layoffs have ripped through Western democracies. In good times and bad, employees are discarded en masse. In the United States during the early 1980s, the axe first fell harshly on industrial workers as manufacturing collapsed.
Now mass layoffs are crushing workers at tech companies with a fury. More than 159,000 tech workers lost their jobs in 2022, and 78,000 more just in January 2023 alone. Since 1996, more than 30 million workers have suffered through mass layoffs, accounting for nearly a fifth of the US labour force.
What is causing this epidemic?
Shareholder capitalism
Mass layoffs, we are told, grow directly from the two irreversible drivers of prosperous economies: globalisation and technology. Every corporation now competes in world markets that constantly create pressures to lower costs as lower-wage workforces in developing nations successfully compete.
— source trtworld.com | Les Leopold | 2023