01/16/2024

Layoffs at Amazon, Google Contrast Small Businesses' Job Creation

Smaller entrepreneurs keep growing their businesses

Few companies are as gigantic as Google and Amazon, yet many small-business owners may nevertheless be looking at the massive layoffs announced by the tech giants and wondering if those cuts should influence their own staffing decisions. After all, these and other tech sector layoffs seem to contradict an otherwise positive economic outlook. That disconnect will only increase many companies' interest in today's release of forecast-influencing figures on inflation, which reportedly remains entrepreneurs' top worry.

The fast-moving tech sector has always been a larger-than-life outlier relative to wider economic activity, as Wednesday's news of new mega-layoffs again attests. After starting 2023 announcing it planned to let 18,000 people go, Amazon this week warned it would eliminate hundreds of positions in its Prime Video, MGM Studios, and Twitch divisions. Never to be "out-enormoused" by any company, Google also revealed it will be laying off what Reuters described as "hundreds of employees across multiple teams," including its Voice Assistant, Pixel, Nest and Fitbit activities.

Trillion-dollar firms like Microsoft and Meta, as well as myriad smaller yet still influential tech companies including Spotify and Shopify, previously ax-ified thousands of jobs, even as the wider economy showed ongoing signs of positive activity. Those defensive moves were at least partly motivated by worries over a possible looming recession--an enduring fear that's also responsible for countless bouts of Wall Street willies.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Inc.