The US economy has shown signs of reversing after a struggle for workers in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. U.S. employers announced 13% more job cuts for 2022 than the year before, according to consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. The cuts were small; Excluding 2021, last year saw the smallest annual job cuts since CGC began tracking in 1993. Still, any tightening of the labor market is beginning to reverse the sway on employers, threatening a brief streak of worker empowerment that has spawned concepts like The Great Resignation, quiet surrender, and a generation of professionals who are said to spend their entire working lives in camper vans in Idaho could.
In one sector, the trickle has already turned into a flood. According to figures from Challenger, the tech industry has increased its announced job cuts by 649% in 2022, with the total of 97,171 marking the highest since the dot-com crash more than 20 years ago. This year doesn’t look any better. So far in January, Amazon.com Inc. announced plans to lay off 18,000 employees, Microsoft Corp. has announced 10,000 job cuts, and more than two dozen U.S. tech companies, including Coinbase, Flexport and Salesforce, have announced they will, according to website Layoffs.fyi, which tracks job cuts in the industry, its workforce decrease by 10% or more.