Months into the ongoing economic crisis affecting the world, financial institutions in the United States are finally sweating from the pressure as they have begun to lay off employees.
At the start of the month, the ax fell for a number of employees at hot-topic financial technology (FinTech) company Chime, as well as former Goldman Sachs partner Michael Novogratz’ crypto firm Galaxy Digital.
Not even the big players in the scene have been exempted from the effects of the crisis. As of Thursday, leading private FinTech and payment gateway developer Stripe announced that it was laying off 14% of its workforce. Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley is set to lay off a number of its employees over the next several weeks.
The Tech Firms Feel the Crunch
But financial institutions aren’t the only ones who are bearing the brunt of the economic slump and the looming specter of recession. Big Tech firms are also laying off people as they cope with the crisis.
Social media network Twitter, in particular, is going through a mass layoff spree in the hands of new owner Elon Musk. The company also faces a class action lawsuit filed by a sizable number of laid-off employees who claim that no prior notice was given or that the notice period was very short before their termination.
In the suit filed by lawyer Shannon Liss-Riordan, former Twitter staff are asking the authorities to make the company comply with the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, a federal law requiring businesses with over 100 employees to give at least 60 days’ notice before a mass termination or similar operational disruptions. The suit also seeks to prevent Twitter from forcing employees to give up their right to participate in any form of litigation against it.
Neither Twitter nor Liss-Riordan has made further comments to the media regarding the issue as of press time.
But even companies that are doing relatively well of late are taking the necessary measures to cope, but have not laid off their people. Instead, they have frozen the hiring process and are not expected to increase their workforce any time soon. Hiring for rank and file staff has been frozen at Apple and cloud services provider Amazon Web Services. The latter’s parent company, Amazon, expects to pause the hiring of corporate staff within the next several weeks.
