Mass layoffs and radical uncertainty in twitter

Twitter layoffs: The internet gave enormous power to the world for the exchange of their ideas. After it, the world became a global interconnected village. This led to a rise in the Information Technology sector. But as they say, when it’s your day, the world will overlook your flaws, negatives, or downsides. The same happened with the IT sector. Some players consolidated power and started dictating terms, narratives and rules of the game.

They monopolised and misused user ‘data’ as per their whims and fancies. With hegemonic power, the big tech giants posed a great threat to democratic countries and civilisational values. But the latest developments suggest that they aren’t that rosy for their own employees as well.

Mass layoffs and radical uncertainty in twitter

The micro blogging site, twitter, is going through a tumultuous period of churn. The new owner, Elon Musk has been radically reforming the organisation as per his liking. Claiming to make twitter an unbiased, trustable and profitable platform, Musk fired the top executives (Parag Agarwal, Vijaya Gadde and others) within minutes of taking charge of the platform. This frenzy was witnessed later as well.

On 4th of November, in a hasty manner, Musk fired around half of the twitter workforce. Reportedly, around 3,700 twitter employees were shown the exit.

Also Read: Big Tech monopoly is on the decline and it’s happening faster than its rise

Justifying his radical moves and mass layoffs, Musk claimed that it was a necessary step as Twitter was suffering losses at a rate of $4 million per day.

Regarding Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day.
Everyone exited was offered 3 months of severance, which is 50% more than legally required.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 4, 2022

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However, Elon Musk has been notorious for making many unplanned decisions, statements and acquisitions and back tracing on it. Within days of the mass layoffs, twitter tried to reach out to dozens of its fired employees asking them to come back. The platform claimed that these employees were fired erroneously or were too essential for the future plans of twitter.

After twitter, Meta to drastically cut down its size

As per media reports, Facebook’s parent company Meta is also preparing to undertake the largest layoff ever seen in the tech sector. It is expected that on the lines of twitter, it may fire employees in large numbers within this week. An official announcement on this line is expected to be released on 9th of November.

As per a report by Wall Street Journal, Meta’s share prices fell by almost 70 percent after the infamous announcement of ‘Metaverse’ by its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. The WSJ report claimed that the upcoming layoffs would be first of its kind in Meta’s 18-year history.

Also Read: Big-Tech is a modern tool of colonisation

The menace of Global big tech comes back to bite its own employees

The Big tech companies (MAANG) are the epitome of crony capitalism. For them, past service, commitment to the organisation, human emotions and sentiments don’t matter at all. The only thing that matters for these global giants are raw numbers, money and their agenda. If for any reason, their agenda or line of thinking changes overnight, they may throw the so-called integral team of the organisations within minutes. This is exactly what happened in these cases. These big tech giants fired their employees like there is no tomorrow.

The Union Information and Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw lambasted the radical move of the microblogging site, twitter. The Minister slammed the platform for firing Indian employees in large numbers without giving them ‘fair time for transition’.

He said that “we condemn the way Twitter has sacked employees in India.” He added that the platform should have given the employees a fair time for transition.

These hegemonic companies must be held accountable for such radical moves and anti-market practices. They exploited the maximum benefit of India’s brain drain and for their twisted agenda or reform, they cut off their ties with their employees as if they were bots. It is high time that a safety valve has to be ensured against such radical and sweeping moves.