Comment on this story
Comment
Hardly a day goes by that there aren’t announcements of mass layoffs at marquee tech firms: 8,000 at Salesforce, 10,000 at Microsoft, 12,000 at Google, the largest in company history, and 18,000 at Amazon. IBM and music streaming service Spotify joined the job-chopping wave this week, bringing the total to more than 200,000 pink slips in tech in recent months. This is a warning for the economy. It’s yet another signal that the consumer spending boom is fading.
The tech layoffs are unlikely to trigger an immediate wave of cuts across the economy or even lift the historically low unemployment rate much. Tech garners a lot of media attention, but only 2 percent of U.S. workers are employed at tech firms — a far smaller influence on the labor market than manufacturing (8 percent of employment), retail (10 percent) or health care (11 percent).
There’s a reality check going on in the tech sector that’s…
