WHEN THE ECONOMY FALLS JOBS GO WITH IT

Inflation and interest rate hikes are causing companies in many sectors to lay off employees. To illustrate the employment trends and the socioeconomic implications, each week we will list job losses.

• Tesla laid off another 200 people
• Netflix cut 3 percent of its workforce
• Amazon has frozen hiring in some areas
• Rivian plans to layoff 5 percent of its 14,000 person workforce
• GoPuff cut 10 percent of its staff or 150 employees
• Microsoft will cut a small percentage of its staff
• Meta Platforms Inc.’s head of engineering informed the managers to identify low performance employees to be fired
• Uber and Lyft have paused hiring
• OpenSea cuts a fifth of staff or 57 people
• 800 jobs at Arrival are at risk after it pledged to cut a third of its costs
• Tonal is cutting 35 percent of its workforce
• Google slows its hiring pace for rest of the year
• BlackRock has delayed hiring freezes for some senior positions until 2023, and total spending on employee pay and benefits fell 5 percent.  Blackrock is also trying to hold down costs by “juniorising” the workforce—hiring less experienced people to open positions
• Starbucks will be closing 16 of their stores
• Fintechs have laid off more than 4,000 employees in the first half of 2022
• With the market in bear territory and IPO’s down 90 percent from last year, The New York Post is predicting a 10 percent reduction on Wall Street
• Tik-Tok has begun laying employees off as it begins restructuring
• Goldman Sachs has warned that it will slow hiring and is considering culling bottom-performing staff
• LinkedIn’s in house hiring data—which shows hiring via the LinkedIn platform was down 12 percent from a year previously

Surveys are showing conflicting positions muddling labor market analysis:

• The WSJ 7/19 “The Institute for Supply Management’s survey of purchasing managers at US factories showed employment contracting in May and June; ISM’s service sector index showed employment contracting in three of the five past months…”
• A survey of employers shows nonfarm payrolls growing at 375,000 a month
• A survey of households shows the economy losing an average of 116,000 jobs over the same span