Strategy or Coincidence? Companies That Are Having Massive Layoffs Before/After Midterms

Data is clear, BigTech didn't make any major layoff moves until after the midterm elections—correlation or causation?

The tweet below by Catturd suspiciously raises the coincidence of massive layoffs by major corporations after the midterm elections—this prompted me to look at the data.

Catturd ™ @catturd2

Funny how all these major corporations waited until right after the midterm to lay off thousands of employees.

Regarding the data, there are a few notes I’d like to make clear:

• When referring to “AFTER Midterms,” the actual meaning refers to all of November, which includes eight days before midterms—however, most layoffs during this month occurred after early midterm voting.

• Keep in mind the principle of correlation vs. causation and accept that there could be many other factors—I am only lightly data investigating one viewpoint. A deeper data investigation would require looking at historical data to compare.

I found a relevant dataset from LayoffsTracker that was sufficient to determine what layoffs looked like in The United States before and after the midterm elections. First, we will look at 2022 layoffs from January to October and list the companies and their count. Then we will look at top companies and layoff count after the midterm elections and compare the two lists.

Overview by Company

The companies in the top 15 (highlighted) are represented by a variety of industries that include tech (Seagate and Microsoft), auto (Argo AI and Ford), and Finance (Fiserv and Robinhood), while the rest include fitness, real estate, transportation, and food.

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It’s interesting to point out that the top companies after the midterms (graph #2) are nowhere to be found in graph #1, which depicts the maximum layoff count by the company before the midterms. There could be many reasons for this, such as reviewing year-end financials and adjusting accordingly. Another is Twitter’s circumstance, with Elon Musk cleaning house and ridding of woke employees with censor-trigging fingers.

Graph #1 (nine months) before elections: 153,597 layoffs from 903 Companies

Graph #2 (two months and five days) after elections: 116,445 from 380 Companies

Overview by Industry

Here’s another visual with a different viewpoint by industry. It’s intriguing how Ecommerce (majority count from Amazon) and Social do a complete switch-a-roo. Of course, one could argue seasonal needs for Amazon’s case, but what caused Meta to wait until after November to do most of their layoffs?

As I started looking at the data, it was immediately apparent layoffs among “BigTech” were held off until after the midterm elections. But was the driving reason to wait completely a political game? Maybe some, but it’s hard to know without looking into their statements as to why they’re laying off additional data. In light of the Twitter Files, I wouldn’t put it past BigTech to pull such a manipulative move on Americans.

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Twitter Files #1-11 Downloads (PDF Format)

(PDF) Twitter Files Release 12: Why Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In

(PDF) Twitter Files Release 13: Twitter and the FBI "Belly Button"