More than 150,000 technical workers will lose their jobs in 2022, By one estimateAnd an additional 23,000 have been laid off since the start of 2023.

These workers are not alone. More than 30 million American workers have experienced mass layoffs since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking them in 1996.

The modern era of mass layoffs began with manufacturing workers as the Rust Belt eroded through the 1970s and 1980s. Then, in the 1990s, white-collar professionals found that their glossy offices weren’t immune from such disasters.

We have come to accept mass layoffs (specified 50 workers or more losing their jobs at one company over a five-week period) as an inevitable cost of doing business in a highly competitive global economy. Americans believe that a successful company must be ruthless in cutting labor costs or risk joining a long line of failed companies that react too slowly.

But mass layoffs are not limited to for-profit companies struggling to survive while maximizing their returns on capital. They have become routine budget strategies in the way employers treat workers, even in nonprofit organizations.

For example, Oberlin College in Ohio terminated 113 unionized food service and cleaning workers in the middle of the pandemic (about 50 of whom were lucky to find work with a subcontractor). This small non-profit college – the first in the United States to admit women in 1833 and black students in 1835 – It chose to cut costs by laying off these workers, many of whom had worked decades of service, and replacing them with subcontractors.

The number of workers who lost their jobs at Oberlin is small compared to the tens of thousands laid off by big tech companies like Amazon in one fell swoop, but the impact mirrors what has happened to millions of Americans, sometimes unrelated to economic downturns.

There is, of course, always an excuse. Costs must be reduced because competition requires it. Colleges must ease tuition increases to compete for students. Budgets need to be balanced, address “structural deficiencies” and protect endowments.

But this type of decision-making does not consider the harm to workers or the consequences for the communities in which they live. In the case of Oberlin, the surrounding city was already saddled with a poverty rate of 25%.

And the damage is always great as described Modern report In Harvard Business Review.

medical studies It showed that the shock of unemployment causes disease. One study found that layoffs Ranked seventh among the most stressful life experiences More stressful than a divorce, a sudden and serious impairment of hearing or sight, or the death of a close friend.

Experts say that it takes, on average, Two years to recover From the psychological trauma of losing a job.

for healthy employees without preexisting health conditions, Possibility of developing a new health condition It rises by 83% in the first 15 to 18 months after layoff. The most common problems are cardiovascular disease, including high blood pressure, heart disease, and arthritis. the Psychological and financial stress A layoff can increase the risk of suicide by 1.3 to 3 times. “displaced workers They have twice the risk of depression, four times the risk of substance abuse, and six times the risk of committing acts of violence, including partner and child abuse,” states the Harvard Business Review.

The loss of income for these workers can last for the rest of their careers. Studies estimate that leaving a job may lead to this Cut workers’ long-term earnings by 20% to 40%.

No wonder it is so Work section She realizes that “being let go of your job is one of the most traumatic events you can face in life.”

Do we really have to inflict such pain and suffering on millions of workers in order to build a prosperous society?

Other highly developed economies have taken a different path. For example, in Germany, Siemens Energy, which has more than 90,000 employees, canceled its plan to terminate 3,000 German workers as part of a Global workforce reduction of 7,800, including 1,700 in the United States, instead, after negotiations with the IG Metall union, agreed to reduce the German workforce only through acquisition and attrition. No one will be forced to leave, and no facility in Germany will be closed. Meanwhile, Siemens in the US will simply cut 1,700 jobs, as planned.

Why there and not here?

Our collective memory is short. We have forgotten that prior to the deregulation revolution four decades ago, mass layoffs were not seen as a necessary corporate tactic. like Newsweek As he put it in 1996, “Once upon a time, it was a disgrace to fire your workers en masse. It means you’ve ruined your business. Today, the more people a company fires, the more love it has on Wall Street, and the higher its stock price.”

More than 25 years later, even the failure to explain the long-term social devastation of mass layoffs has not been questioned. As a nation, we have not yet decided that protecting the health and well-being of our workers should be a top priority—at least as important as temporary increases to corporate profits.

Les Leopold is the executive director of the Labor Institute in New York. He is the author of Fugitive Inequality: An Activist’s Guide to Economic Justice.