by Wolf Richter, Wolf Street:
Still not many layoffs, but concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area. Workers found new jobs quickly, and employment in California still rose.
Amid all these breathless layoff announcements by tech and social media companies, I’m going to keep an eye on actual layoffs in California as disclosed in the WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification) reports. The big tech and social media companies are global companies, and the layoff announcements are global, and they’re just announcements, and only part of them take place in the US, and those are scattered all around the US.
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How many layoffs in California since July 1?
In total, 54,679 layoffs in all of California were disclosed in the WARN reports in the seven and a half months since July 1, when this layoff tango took on momentum. This includes a large variety of companies, from hospitals to Google, each for its own reasons.
But over the period from July 1 through December, employment has grown by 229,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics state data (latest available), which shows that the laid-off workers are generally absorbed by other employers fairly quickly, and employment growth continued.
Many employers that had been outbid for talent by the tech and social-media overhiring and overpaying frenzy finally have a chance to staff up on their terms.
The 15 counties with the most layoffs.
The table below shows the 15 counties with the most layoffs since July 1. However, here are some important points to complicate the picture:
Los Angeles is the largest county in California, with a population of nearly 10 million people. Over a quarter of California’s population lives in L.A. County. Many other counties are small. This is an important consideration because L.A. County had the largest number of layoffs since July 1 (9,379), but it was small given the size of the huge county.
But San Francisco, which has less than 1/10th of the population (834,000), had 6,971 layoffs – even that is a relatively small number, given the size of the labor market in San Francisco, but it was by far the largest layoff-to-population ratio in the state.
Marin, a small county by population, on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge, shows 578 layoffs by just one company, Autodesk, which is closing its headquarters office in Marin County and moving its headquarters to San Francisco. Most of its workers are on a hybrid working-from-home basis. But it also reported 61 layoffs at its office in San Francisco. It announced in early February that it will lay off 250 workers of its global workforce. So it seems Autodesk submitted the WARN filing because it permanently closed a facility while most of the workers assigned to the Marin office will be re-assigned to the San Francisco office and keep their jobs.
San Benito, a rural county south of Silicon Valley with a population of just 64,000, is at risk of losing its only hospital, Hazel Hawkins Memorial Hospital, which may file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy and reported 741 layoffs with an effective date of February 18. Rural hospitals across the US are in trouble.
The three major counties with a significant number of layoffs in proportion to their population are San Francisco, Santa Clara (Southern part of Silicon Valley), and San Mateo (northern part of Silicon Valley):
| County of: | Layoffs | % of CA layoffs | Pop. in 1,000 | Layoffs % of pop. | |
| 1 | Los Angeles | 9,379 | 17.2% | 9,861 | 0.1% |
| 2 | Santa Clara | 7,069 | 12.9% | 1,936 | 0.4% |
| 3 | San Francisco | 6,971 | 12.7% | 834 | 0.8% |
| 4 | San Diego | 5,533 | 10.1% | 3,298 | 0.2% |
| 5 | Alameda | 4,705 | 8.6% | 1,682 | 0.3% |
| 6 | San Mateo | 4,330 | 7.9% | 764 | 0.6% |
| 7 | Orange | 3,594 | 6.6% | 3,186 | 0.1% |
| 8 | Sacramento | 1,553 | 2.8% | 1,585 | 0.1% |
| 9 | San Bernardino | 2,086 | 3.8% | 2,181 | 0.1% |
| 10 | Riverside | 1,595 | 2.9% | 2,418 | 0.1% |
| 11 | Kern | 1,039 | 1.9% | 909 | 0.1% |
| 12 | San Benito | 789 | 1.4% | 64 | 1.2% |
| 13 | Contra Costa | 689 | 1.3% | 1,165 | 0.1% |
| 14 | Marin | 682 | 1.2% | 262 | 0.3% |
| 15 | Ventura | 634 | 1.2% | 843 | 0.1% |
| Total | 50,648 | 92.6% | 30,988 | 0.2% |
In the US, even in good times, 1.8 million layoffs and discharges per month.
Companies lay off workers for a variety of reasons, including company-specific issues. And companies fire workers for all kinds of reasons. This is part of the regular churn. No one writes about this because it happens all the time. These workers are relatively quickly absorbed by other employers, and unemployment remains low.
In the US overall, every month during the Good Times before the pandemic, between 1.6 million and 1.8 million workers were laid off or were discharged. And they found jobs relatively quickly.
But during the bad times, suddenly there are 2.5 million layoffs and discharges a month, month after month, just when employers have stopped hiring, and the number of unemployed people looking for a job surges, while companies batten down the hatches.
But that’s precisely what we’re not seeing yet. Total layoffs and discharges in the US have ticked up from the record lows a year ago, to 1.48 million in December, but remain well below the lows of the Good Times before the pandemic, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
