this post was submitted on 02 May 2024
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First, unions don’t prevent mass layoffs. They might help make things more manageable and help some individuals in need but layoffs are entirely at the discretion of the business.
And second, the industry is contracting because it hasn’t innovated in more than 5 years now. There is no growth vector but loads of people who aren’t producing value (not their fault, there is nothing to produce). Of course, better protection for employees is always needed, but as someone who watched an european company reduce its workforce from 110k people to 19k over the course of 3 years in early 2010s, i can guarantee that nothing can stop a business from maximizing profits.
This is what we’re seeing now: the work is simply not needed.
They'll say the work is not needed. That's because the workload gets pushed to whoever is left. Is there a way you go from 110k employees to 20k and have no workload increase at all without some suffering some deficiencies somewhere in the product. Doubt it.
Another thing is who decides what the employees work on. "Industry hasn't innovated in x years" okay that's on CEO/management they decide what products to invest time in. It seems all that's left are barbarians in these companies. Possibly the visionaries have long been layed off it seems?
because it isn’t. Product lines which were supposed to grow and bring profit have become stagnant and useless. E.g. Alexa which was supposed to help amazon convince people to buy stuff but instead plays music in the morning. Normally there would be another growing sector to relocate the more overstaffed department but there isn’t. So.
That was done through closing down branches of the company which weren’t performing and automation in the rest. It wasn’t painless, far from it, but the point was that unions couldn’t stop it, not that it was fair or nice.
sure, but what difference does it make? Yes, the stagnant technology market is directly the result of bad policies and poor investment. But that doesn’t help with the layoffs. That just is.
Knowing Amazon quite well, there definitely are sectors that are seriously deficient even new emerging ones within Amazon seem deficient.
I agree it wasn't painless in fact there is a high suicide rate within the computer sciences field. In fact it probably still isn't painless. I also agree unions are useless but some government regulation wouldn't be.
Yea everything is. Until it isn't.