Over 6,000 tech job cuts roil Bay Area economy
Tech and biotech companies have revealed plans recently for enough job cuts to erase more than 6,000 jobs in the Bay Area, cutbacks that could weigh on the region’s economy in the weeks and months to come.
Job cuts affecting thousands of workers in the Bay Area have been submitted to California labor officials starting in early October, according to this news organization’s analysis of WARN letters and posts on the state Employment Development site.
“Tech layoffs are happening, the people who are affected, their lives are being disrupted,” said Russell Hancock, president of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, a San Jose-based think tank. “In some cases, it may mean that they will be deported.”
The sobering total since Oct. 1: Well over 6,200 jobs affecting tech or biotech workers have been cut or are scheduled to be eliminated at Bay Area locations by sometime in February 2023, the EDD filings show.
“The tech and biotech layoffs are not happening at a rate that will damage the overall Bay Area economy,” said Patrick Kallerman, vice president of research for the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. “That’s not to say that something else might not occur. But the cuts so far appear to be primarily circumstantial.”
The largest known total of Bay Area tech and biotech layoffs in the current crop of cutbacks was reported by Facebook app owner Meta Platforms, which last week revealed plans to eliminate 2,564 jobs in the region.
Here are some primary details of the notable staffing reductions being planned, or recently completed, in the nine-county region by tech and biotech companies. The information consists of the name and number of jobs being cut in the Bay Area:
■ Meta Platforms, 2,564 jobs in Menlo Park, San Francisco, Sunnyvale, Burlingame and Fremont
■ Cepheid, 1,000 in Newark, Sunnyvale and Santa Clara
■ Twitter, 890 in San Francisco and San Jose
■ Amazon, 263 in Sunnyvale
■ Lyft, 227 in San Francisco
■ Oracle, 200 in Redwood City and Belmont Meta’s biggest chunk of layoffs was slated to occur in Menlo Park, where the company has its world headquarters. The owner of Facebook is eliminating 1,642 jobs in Menlo Park, 362 in San Francisco, 237 in Sunnyvale, 179 in Burlingame and 144 in Fremont.
The most recent jobs report from the state Employment Development Department, released on Friday, showed that the Bay Area added a robust 17,600 jobs in October, powered by big gains in Santa Clara County, the San Francisco-san Mateo region and the East Bay.
Of the overall total gained in October, tech companies added 6,300 jobs, or 35.7% — more than one-third — of all the positions that were gained last month, according to this news organization’s analysis of seasonally adjusted figures that Beacon Economics and UC Riverside compiled and provided.