Imagine Getting Laid Off This Brutally

Google employees discovered they'd been laid off when their access badges stopped working. Meanwhile France is having a general strike

Google’s motto used to be, “Don’t be evil” — which must seem like a cruel joke to the 12,000 employees it just laid off by email, reportedly including long-tenured and recently promoted workers. Google’s communication was so poor that some employees discovered they had lost their jobs when their access badges failed to grant them entry into the office. Brutal.

Daniel Roberts @readDanwrite

Google NYC employees who arrived at the office early this morning stood in a line to test their badges-- if light turned red, it meant you had been laid off. if green, you were safe. 👎

The layoffs account for a whopping 6% of Google’s workforce, the latest in a spate of tech industry layoffs: Amazon plans to lay off 18,000 employees, Microsoft to let go 10,000, and Salesforce to cut about 10% of its over 70,000 employees. Executives blame the layoffs on hiring too quickly early in the pandemic which there’s probably some truth to but if unions were more of a thing and it wasn’t so easy to lay people off, companies would think twice before hiring people on a whim.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Take France, where the leader of the country’s second-largest trade union threatened to cut electricity to members of parliament and billionaires “so that they can put themselves, for a few days, in the shoes of … French people who can’t afford to pay their bill.” (France is in the midst of a general strike in opposition to the government’s attempt to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64.) That’s the kind of pipe you can swing when you have high union density.

Feel Like This Should Be A Bigger Story

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