Laid off in your living room: the chaos of remote job cuts
Kerensa Cadenas opened Slack one morning recently to an expletive-laden message from a colleague that said essentially: “I got let go.” Cadenas, steeling herself, checked her email. Then she typed out her own expletive. She’d been laid off, too. Alone in her New York City apartment.
Cadenas, with more than 100 of her Vox Media colleagues as well as thousands of other workers this month, was submerged in a lonely, surreal wave of remote layoffs. People got the news through emails, Slack messages or video calls, then sent their goodbye notes and powered down their computers, with no teammates around to commiserate over beer.
“Normally you’re like, ‘OK, I can go get drunk,’” said Cadenas, 37, noting that atop the isolation comes frustration with the instability that so many media workers have now come to accept as a fact of their working lives. “It’s scary because I’m like: ‘Will I ever have a savings account? Am I ever going to own something? Probably not.’”
This month, angst has rippled across laptop screens, with dozens of companies announcing mass layoffs and even the most large and well-established workplaces finding distinct ways to breed extra chaos in the process. More than 1,000 tech companies laid off nearly 160,000 workers last year, according to Layoffs.fyi, which is tracking job cuts across the industry, and another 185 companies have cut some 57,000 tech workers since the start of this year.
Layoffs are among the most challenging life experiences, causing more psychological stress than even divorce, according to one study. Losing a job can upend workers’ finances and their sense of self, and layoffs in the world of remote work have in many cases been especially destabilising, with employer missteps fueling uncertainty and unnecessary unknowns.
At Twitter, employees were notified in the middle of the night that they had been laid off, and at least one worker found out during a team call when that person lost access to company accounts. At the mortgage lending company Better.com, Rena Starr, 33, missed a short and unexpected Zoom meeting in 2021, then texted her boss to learn she and more than 900 of her colleagues had been fired during it. In a later round of job cuts at Better.com, last year, some employees there learned they had been laid off when severance pay hit their payroll accounts.
NOWHERE TO TURN
“They’re immediately cutting you off from your technological connection,” said Sandra Sucher, a professor of management at Harvard who has studied layoffs for more than a decade. “I’ve been hearing of a number of companies where people were in the middle of things and couldn’t continue and didn’t know who to address.”
Many laid off workers are left with a long list of questions and an utter lack of clarity about who can help them. A recruiter at Amazon was told within four months of starting her job that it would almost certainly be cut, and she was encouraged to accept a severance package. She had to mail back her company computer and doesn’t have a personal one, making it challenging to search for a new job.
At some companies, people noted that their teammates were far more helpful than their employers after a layoff. Shortly after losing her job at an e-commerce marketing company in November, Erika Kwee, 32, heard from a colleague who had crowdsourced a list of opportunities and recruiter contacts to help Kwee navigate the search process.
But many remote workers don’t even have their colleagues’ phone numbers, and they don’t know who to go to for comfort or information. Beth Anstandig, a psychotherapist in the Bay Area, is seeing her clients bear the mental toll of this period.
“I hear that people are not sleeping, or sleeping two hours at a time on their couches,” said Anstandig, who is currently working with both clients conducting layoffs and those experiencing them, many of whom are distressed and overworked. “They’re in tears during our meetings together.”
Millions of American workers have never known a world without the spectre of mass layoffs. That kind of instability has characterised the economy since the late 1970s and ’80s, when the notion of prioritising shareholders above all else took root and companies embraced the strategy of growing fast and then cutting down quick. Some executives rushed to frame that tumult as intrinsic to corporate life: In 1996, Robert Eaton, chief executive of Chrysler Corp, said that downsizing and layoffs are part of the price of becoming more competitive. Now 85% of workers rank job loss as a top concern, according to the latest Edelman Trust Barometer.
‘GREAT CONTRADICTION’
Last year ended with job cuts across tech behemoths: Meta laid off more than 11,000 workers, or about 13% of its workforce, and Lyft laid off 13% of its workers. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, said recently it plans to cut 12,000 jobs, or about 6% of its global workforce; Microsoft plans to cut 10,000 jobs, or 5% of its employees; and Spotify last week said it would cut 6% of its workforce. For many of these companies, these cuts followed years of free-flowing perks and flexible work arrangements that were part of what was called a “war for talent.”
“That is one of the great contradictions of corporate life,” Sucher said. “All corporations say ‘People are our most important asset,’ but they don’t really seem to believe that.”
“Calling someone ‘talent’ is quite different from calling them a person,” she added. “People aren’t a resource that can be depleted over time.”
Trip Barnes, 39, who works in Atlanta, has been laid off three times in the past three years, each experience bringing pangs of grief. In spring 2020, he got an 8 am call from his longtime boss and was quickly told that he was being laid off from his hospitality staffing role and would be hearing from human resources about the details later that morning.
“Everybody in the moment is trying to get out of the conversation — get it done quickly,” Barnes said. “It was all about ripping the Band-Aid off.”
Two weeks ago, he rewatched his favourite movie, “Up in the Air,” a 2009 film that follows a character played by George Clooney whose job is to ax people from corporations. Barnes resonated, painfully, with the treatment of workers as interchangeable and expendable.
And in some industries, especially media, many workers voiced a sense of resignation with the layoffs that swept their workplaces this month.
Phoebe Gavin, 37, who ran talent and development for Vox.com, said she wasn’t surprised when she found out Jan 20 that she had lost her job. Ever since her role was cut at the storytelling website Upworthy in 2015, Gavin has been preparing for bouts of unemployment. She has put 10% of every paycheck into her savings account, building a nest egg.
In 2019, she started a coaching business, which she devoted her Saturdays and early mornings to building, because she wanted a backup plan if she had to deal with losing a job again.
“I don’t have any expectation for any company I work for to prioritise my interests,” Gavin said.