Being made redundant can have a serious effect on your health
He fired up and told me that, no, 'mass layoffs' had not always happened. He said they were a relatively recent phenomenon that had only become 'normalised' in the past few decades.
I looked into it, and it seems he is right. And it got me thinking: why are mass redundancies necessary?
I'm so sorry to hear you were made redundant – and that your sacking came as a shock. The sudden loss of a job can have a serious effect on your psychological and even your physical health, and I hope your former employer has offered expert help in this regard. I'm pleased to hear you have friends thinking of you at this time and providing you moral support.
I asked Dr Gary Bowman, the MBA director at Adelaide Business School, about your specific question. I told him that in your longer email you mentioned the wide-scale redundancy didn't seem to accompany any major crisis or financial problem at the company you worked for.
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'Redundancies are an inevitable, albeit unfortunate, part of corporate life. Of course they are more common during economic downturns – or when there is the anticipation of a downturn – but they are not always a sign of trouble or failure. In fact, often, quite the opposite.'
Bowman used Microsoft, Meta and Google's parent company Alphabet as examples of this last point.
'[They] have made significant redundancies in the last few years. All were performing well and had significant financial reserves. All three, and many, many other companies around the world are also now paring back their over-expansion during the rapid post-COVID growth.'
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