Micron Technology is an American semiconductor company that provides the industry standard processes for the manufacture of semiconductor materials. The company was founded in 1959 and is headquartered in Fremont, California.
The company announced Thursday it would be laying off 500 people in the San Francisco Bay Area. This is the second consecutive year the company has been affected by a global recession. In March Micron hired 100 new workers in the US.
The California layoffs are part of a broader global trend, and it’s not just in the US. Recently, Google and Microsoft announced that they would be closing their HQs in California and Texas in order to take advantage of the state’s low labor costs. Micron is also laying off workers in other states too, but because the layoffs are now nationwide, it’s hard to say whether they are related.
Micron’s decision to lay off 100 new employees a year since 2009 might not be a coincidence: as the company has been hit hard by the recession, it’s likely that it’s had to cut back the amount of work that it does in order to make sure its payroll doesn’t keep going down.
The layoffs have sparked a lot of debate in the tech world over the fact that layoffs are bad for morale. Microns CEO, Jim Stinson, said “The company’s going to be a little bit different in the future, but the bottom line is we’re going to be leaner. We’re going to be more efficient. We’re going to be a lot more efficient for the future of the company.
The fact is that Micron has had a lot of layoffs for the years that this story is about, but now it’s time to move on. Like many technology stories, it’s a tough call, because there’s no way to tell if this is the start of a new wave of layoffs or not, it seems.
We’re a little bit early in the process of determining whether this is a good or not, but we’re a little bit early if it is. We’ve heard from people that have been affected, but we haven’t heard from the actual Micron employees that have been laid off. We’ll see when they get back, but we’re guessing they’re probably somewhere in the middle.
In an interview with techblog.com, the Micron CTO, Michael McClean, said all employees were being let go because Micron needed to cut expenses. Apparently this is another company that is downsizing, and this is another company that is downsizing because they have had to cut workers in order to make more money. Its really hard to tell at this point, because there have been layoffs at many companies over the last few years, some with good reason…
McClean says that Micron is cutting its workforce about 25% because of the company’s “financial restructuring.” This is not a good thing. In the past few years Micron has slashed its workforce by more than half, including a 25% drop in the US. You can read more about this in our blog post, “How to Find Great Jobs in an Economy with No Jobs.
We’re not going to give any actual numbers, but we know that Micron has cut the workforce by 25% across all its US divisions. This includes the biggest names in the medical and semiconductor industries. That’s not good.