According to Bloomberg, Google has made hundreds of layoffs from a variety of divisions, including engineering, hardware (which produces the Fitbit and Pixel phone), and Google Virtual Assistant staff, in an effort to reduce costs.
The reductions follow a pattern of tech layoffs that began last year when major corporations like Google, Meta, and Amazon let go of thousands of employees. This year has seen more corporations declare job losses in the first ten days.
Earlier on Wednesday, hundreds of workers were let go by Amazon from its Twitch streaming service, Prime Video, and MGM studios.
This month, video game software developer Unity Software announced plans to cut staff, while Xerox disclosed plans to lay off 15% of its 23,000 workers.
As the global economy deteriorated, Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, encouraged the company to focus more narrowly and cut costs. This was done starting in July 2022.
With the largest layoffs the company has ever experienced, Google let go of 12,000 workers in January 2023, or 6% of its total staff. Since then, management has said that they will try to drastically cut costs as the company focuses on the developing field of generative artificial intelligence.
Google, which employed 182,000 people as of September 30, stated that the Wednesday layoffs were a part of a number of reorganizations done as part of routine company operations.
“Our members and colleagues work diligently every day to create excellent products for our users,” the Google worker union tweeted on X. The corporation should not be allowed to keep firing staff members in spite of its quarterly billion-dollar profits. We’re going to keep fighting until we have safe work.”
