EMCC European Monitoring Centre on Change

After several years of intensive hiring, the big tech industry's employee growth has been slowing down. Google-owner Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and many others have recently announced they will reduce headcount. In the company announcements, the main motivator is a slowdown in demand for their services, which had been high during the coronavirus pandemic. The job reductions at the global level are quite significant: 12,000 in Google, 11,000 in Meta, 10,000 in Microsoft and 7,900 in Salesforce. However, they are relatively small compared to the number of hirings that have taken place in recent years. The layoffs are taking place mainly in the USA and, on a lesser scale, in Europe. As many of the big tech firms have their European headquarters in Dublin, a disproportionate share of European jobs cuts is likely to take place in Ireland.

This is evident from recent announcements recorded in Eurofound’s European Restructuring Monitor (ERM) events database, where most of the large, transnational job reduction cases reported in recent months have involved the well-known big tech companies. The ERM dataset is updated daily with fresh cases of large job losses (and job gains) and will continue to monitor the impact in the tech sector.

• European Restructuring Monitor: Restructuring events database