Ireland had 'by far' the highest tech lay offs in EU, Eurofound confirms
The IT sector accounted for about 5% of the total European workforce in 2022, but reaches over 8% in Ireland, according to Eurofound. Picture: AP Photo/Jeff Chiu
Ireland has been "by far" the biggest casualty when it comes to the tech giants laying off staff, with 40% of the redundancies in the EU over the past three years.
An analysis by the Dublin-based EU agency Eurofound, or the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, examined worldwide job cuts at Facebook parent Meta, Amazon, Salesforce, Microsoft, and Google.
"It is clear Ireland is by far the country most affected by big tech restructurings, which is not surprising since most of these tech companies’ European or EMEA headquarters are based there."
Between the end of 2022 and the first half of 2023, almost 300,000 employees working for ‘big tech’ companies were laid off across the world, Eurofound said.
After predictions during the covid-19 pandemic that demand for their services would grow, leading tech firms went on a hiring spree before readjusting their ambitions when their targets failed to materialise.
Layoffs are one of the largest cost-cutting measures taken since then, Eurofound said.
The IT sector accounted for about 5% of the total European workforce in 2022, but reaches over 8% in Ireland, according to the agency.
"It is clear that Ireland is by far the country most affected by big tech restructurings, which is not surprising since most of these tech companies’ European or EMEA headquarters are based there.
"After collating cases of big tech job cuts from the European Restructuring Monitor (ERM) database from 2020 to mid-2023, Ireland accounts for the largest proportion of all redundancies in the sector in the EU — around 40%," Eurofound said.
The ERM is Eurofound's company restructuring gauge of EU member states for the past 21 years, recording more than 28,000 such events.
The agency's analysis added while Ireland is highly reliant on the ICT sector for employment, tax revenue and value-added, "the Central Bank has stated that job losses to date are not considered significant or a threat to the broader economy".
Other EU states are also dealing with the fallout from IT job losses, Eurofound said, especially in Germany and France.
"The ERM has recorded several cases of redundancies announced by well-known tech companies, including Twitter, Stripe, PayPal, SAP, IBM, Spotify, Hubspot and Yahoo, which have cut jobs in Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Portugal and Ireland," it said.
Smaller and perhaps less well-known EU tech companies are also laying off workers, Eurofound added.
"For instance, Casavo is dismissing 150 people in Italy, Portugal and Spain, and Payfit cut 200 jobs in France, Germany and Spain."
There has been little publicity about the redundancy conditions offered to the workers affected and little detail about the employment conditions of those workers who were laid off in recent restructurings, Eurofound said.
"Trade union participation in restructuring processes has been limited or non-existent among the tech companies. However, since the recent restructurings, there has been a rapid increase in membership of the Alphabet Workers Union, and a European works council for Google’s workforce has been organised," it said.
