Layoff

A layoff is the temporary suspension or permanent termination of employment of an employee or, more commonly, a group of employees (collective layoff).

Quotes

• As the coronavirus epidemic stretches on, working people are facing an economic collapse, the likes of which have not been seen since the Great Depression. Organizing to fight for an immediate ban on all layoffs has to be an essential part of any program to protect the working class and to make the capitalist’s pay for their crisis. [...] Confronting this crisis ultimately means confronting capitalism, and that means directly resisting these layoffs, since layoffs are always the first weapon used against working people in moments of economic crisis. Big businesses and corporations that have benefited from years of economic growth (not to mention the massive surplus value of workers’ labor) owe employees and their families a huge debt and it’s time to pay up.
  • James Dennis Hoff, Freeze Layoffs: Make the Capitalists Pay (March 23, 2020), Left Voice

• When times are good, capital can extract huge profits from labor with little risk. For instance, after the last economic crisis, the S&P 500 (thanks in large part to government bailouts) not only managed to recover all of its losses by 2013, it then proceeded to almost double its value in the seven years that followed — an average rate of growth equal to about 14 percent per year. By contrast, average hourly wages for working people, which rose less than three percent per year for most of that same period, recovered much more slowly, and many workers actually saw their wages fall or remain flat when adjusted for inflation. When times are bad, however, in moments of crisis, when profits are low, or when there is little or no demand — such as we are seeing in many industries today — corporations and companies can protect themselves and their market value by simply letting workers go. Workers, on the other hand usually must continue to pay for food, rent, healthcare, and basic utilities in order to survive. As a consequence, while capital can often weather the storm of such economic crises, they can severely weaken the power of the working class by creating what Marx called a vast reserve army of labor. And since unemployment insurance compensations are rarely available to all and always only for a short period of time, workers — whether laid off or only threatened with the prospect of layoffs—will eventually be pressured to work much harder for less wages. And this is precisely why the future of worker’s power depends on how we respond to this crisis now. While capitalists and their paid politicians will scoff at these demands, claiming they are economically infeasible or impossible, this is because they only understand the language of profit and cannot imagine a world run for the benefit of all. Nonetheless, the fact remains that capital has significant resources that could and must be made available to all working people.
  • James Dennis Hoff on the 2020 stock market crash, Freeze Layoffs: Make the Capitalists Pay (March 23, 2020), Left Voice

• Even if you're not laid off, a lot of people are more interested in finding new jobs now because you realize that tech is no longer safe
  • Kyum Kim Thousands of Meta workers signed up to Blind the day before Mark Zuckerberg announced mass layoffs (Jyoti Mann Sun, November 20, 2022, 1:43 AM·2 min read)

• Políticos: somos vuestros jefes y os estamos haciendo un ERE
  • Polititians: we're your bosses and this is a layoff plan
    • Movimiento 15-M, as translated in The Mask and the Flag: Populism, Citizenism and Global Protest by Paolo Gerbaudo, Oxford University Press, 2017

See also

• Employment
• Job security
• Social security
• Unemployment
• Work