An electric vehicle company and a big hotel have disclosed plans for hundreds of job cuts affecting their Bay Area workers, the latest jolts for an increasingly wobbly employment market in the nine-county region.
Rivian Automotive and Marriott San Mateo Hotel have revealed their decisions to chop jobs in the Bay Area, according to official notices the companies sent to the state Employment Development Department (EDD).
The two companies plan to slash a combined 276 jobs in the Bay Area, the WARN notices show.
Here are the details of the recent layoffs:
— Rivian Automotive, a maker of electric vehicles, has decided to cut 149 jobs in Palo Alto. The company also is cutting another 154 jobs in the Orange County city of Irvine.
— Marriott San Mateo Hotel is cutting 127 jobs in San Mateo as part of the closure of that hotel. In 2016, tech leviathan Oracle bought the hotel property for $132 million.
The job cuts are all described as being permanent.
So far in 2024, tech companies have disclosed their intention to eliminate about 5,400 jobs in the Bay Area.
Were the current pace of layoffs in the Bay Area to persist over the entire year, it’s possible the region could experience more than 30,000 tech industry job cuts.
That projected number would exceed the nearly 21,600 tech industry job cuts that were reported in all of 2023. In 2022, the tech industry chopped about 10,300 jobs.
In 2022, 2023 and so far in 2024, tech companies have revealed plans to jettison about 37,300 jobs in the Bay Area.
Still, tech companies — even those that have revealed plans for layoffs over the most recent two years and two months — are hiring in some departments even as they have dismissed workers in less promising areas.
But a growing number of warning signs have begun to flash to suggest the ongoing cascade of layoffs has begun to weigh down the overall employment picture for the Bay Area tech industry.
During 2023, tech companies cut a net total of 14,600 jobs in the Bay Area, according to a Beacon Economics estimate based on the seasonally adjusted numbers reported by the state EDD.
