Wayfair and Google join tech companies in announcing significant layoffs

The country has been experiencing mass layoffs for the past week.

In the past seven days, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Wayfair, based in Boston, all made significant staff reductions. This month alone, it has led to tens of thousands of layoffs.

Wayfair announced in the early hours of Friday that it will lay off more than 1,700 employees. In addition, the company laid off nearly 900 employees in August 2022.

"These changes reflect efforts to eliminate management layers and reorganize to be more agile," the company stated in a memo to employees.

For the past two decades, Peter Ireland has taught economics at Boston College. "There is no way you can spin this as good news," Ireland said. "Those (companies) are all sectors of the economy that really boomed while the rest of the economy was struggling in the pandemic and its aftermath."

According to Ireland, each of these companies that are cutting back on staff is in the tech, financial, or online retail sectors. Every part of the economy that did well during the pandemic had to hire quickly to keep up with demand.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced a 10,000-job reduction on Friday. In a statement to the company Pichai said, "Over the past two years we've seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today."