Break Glass In Case Of Layoff

Why contingency, not prevention, is the answer to preserve employability during the worst layoff season since 2008.

In 2020 my then-girlfriend found herself and 30,000 other theme park workers to be a victim of a silent COVID side effect: job loss. She didn’t learn of her fate through email and she wasn’t blindsided over Zoom.

She found out from CNN.

One of the most disturbing but quite real listicles I’ve read is published now on what seems like an annual basis: “Every Company Doing Layoffs This Month.” I’m not super familiar with the finer points of the end stages of capitalism, but layoff round up pieces are probably as good a sign as any that a capitalist society is in trouble, especially given January 2024 saw a 136% increase in layoffs across industries, one of the worst layoff seasons since the 2008 recession.

For technical roles, especially at big tech firms, 2023 was a bad year; it was the first time, post-pandemic, companies were adjusting for inflated head counts they justified with post-pandemic consumer and client buying trends. Q1 of 2024 seems to be more of the same. And, like the 2023 cuts, the trends seem poised to be just as indiscriminate when it comes to how “downsizing” goes. Although the buzzier headlines are happening in an industry I have a vested interest in, publishing (being a former journalist and engineer at a publisher), with The Los Angeles times cutting 1/5th (20% for the…