The economic ripple effects of the coronavirus pandemic are becoming increasingly difficult to track. Weekly job reports by the Department of Labor may be jaw-dropping and wholly unsettling, but they mostly tell the story in raw numbers.
Those numbers have real people and real companies behind them. In just the last few days, TripAdvisor, Juul, Lyft, and Uber have joined—or reportedly may soon join—the list of once-high-flying companies that are cutting a significant percentage of their staffs.
Layoffs.fyi, an online tool created by San Francisco entrepreneur Roger Lee, has been meticulously cataloging such layoffs since early March, when the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Built on an Airtable spreadsheet, the tool is an impressively substantial source of up-to-date information, including details such as the number of affected employees, which cities are impacted, links to news sources, and, of course, the names of the companies.
It’s billed as a source of “tech startup layoffs,” but it also includes publicly traded companies such as Lyft and TripAdvisor. As of Wednesday afternoon, it showed more than 32,000 employees have been laid off by 337 companies. It also includes links to employee-curated lists where laid-off workers can network with each other. Most helpfully, a separate tab in the spreadsheet includes a list of companies that are still hiring during the COVID-19 pandemic—which is, sadly, a resource many workers need right now.
You can check out the tool here, where you can also donate a few dollars to help with the cost of maintaining it.
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