Email layoffs show what employers really think of their workers 

GOOGLE’S parent company, Alphabet, recently announced that it would lay off around 12,000 people, 6 per cent of its work force. Employees who were let go, some of whom had worked for the company for decades, got the news in their inbox. “It’s hard for me to believe that after 20 years at #Google I unexpectedly find out about my last day via an email,” a Google engineer, Jeremy Joslin, tweeted. “What a slap in the face.”

That sting is becoming an all-too-common sensation. In the last few years, tens of thousands of people have been laid off by email at tech and digital media companies including Twitter, Amazon, Meta and Vox. The backlash from affected employees has been swift.

Employees at a tech company called PagerDuty received notices last week that set a new low bar for a layoff announcement, starting off with a few hundred words of cheery blather and rounding out with a Martin Luther King Jr quotation about overcoming adversity.