A group of YouTube Music staff found out that they had been made redundant while speaking at a council meeting in Texas, urging councillors to support them in their efforts to get the Google-owned company to negotiate with their union. Google says they were contractors whose agreements have expired
There’s a percentage (of their workforce) that if companies cross it while doing layoffs, they are required to give a pretty big notice to the employees before laying them off. I think maybe 60 or 90 days?
There’s several other criteria as well, such as the company being a certain size, and it has to be a high enough percentage of employees at that specific location. But this is part of why you’ll hear about several layoff cycles within a year at one company instead of all at once.
Most companies that do meet the criteria just pay out the employees in lieu of the notice, which is allowed, but avoiding paying at all is definitely a motivator to avoid doing bigger rounds of layoffs.
They just see it as the cost of doing layoffs.
This notice is called the WARN Act.
The pay out isn’t in lieu of the notice. What they do is lay off employees on the same day they publish the notice, and just keep the laid off employees on the payroll for 60 or 90 days, depending on jurisdiction (New York requires 90 days whereas most other states only require 60 days). This complies legally, but it’s questionable ethically given the whole point of the act is to give employees advance notice of layoffs.
What’s funny is watching tech companies try to apply this US-centric approach in other countries. Some European countries have a layoff process that takes multiple months to complete, and requires the employer to have just cause. They can’t lay off people just because they want to. Some big tech companies that wanted to lay off employees in European offices failed to do so because of the strong protection of workers.