Google paid THIS amount as severance to employees laid off in first quarter of 2024
Google continues to lay off employees with more than 1,000 additional roles being cut in the first quarter of 2024. The tech giant has already spent $700 million on employee severance charges.
Google had to let go of a significant number of employees in 2023. The company fire more more than 12,000 people to be precise. For a business, however, firing people is not as easy as it may seem. When an employee is let go from a firm, they frequently reimburse them for their lost wages as well as additional costs. In 2023, Google had to pay a total of $2.1 billion for these benefits and associated expenses.
As of right now, Google has already paid an extra $700 million for comparable employee severance benefits in just the first month of 2024. This time, they are eliminating over a thousand more roles (i.e., corporate positions). When Alphabet, Google's parent firm, revealed its financial results for the last quarter of the year, they disclosed this information.
Remarkably, within the first week of January, Google let go of 1000 workers from various divisions. It appears that the business is still terminating employees, nevertheless. Employees were advised by CEO Sundar Pichai to expect further layoffs in the upcoming months.
According to The Verge, it obtained a message that Sundar Pichai sent to Google staff members, in which he stated that the business had ambitious plans for the year that would necessitate large expenditures. However, certain difficult choices must be taken in order to create space for these investments. These choices involve layoffs and reorganisations across a number of Google teams, including core engineering, YouTube, hardware, advertising, search, commerce, maps, and policy.
Pichai said that these layoffs are not as bad as the ones from the prior year, which accounted for 12,000 jobs lost. Even though it was a smaller-scale incident, he understood how painful it must be for staff members to see teammates and teams negatively impacted. The letter highlights the difficulties and highlights how these decisions are necessary to make room for the company's ambitious objectives.