Boston-Area Tech Layoff Tracker Slows: Is The Worst of Recession Over Yet?
If you’re one of those fortunate people who are gainfully employed, you may have joined the droves of other Boston-area innovators who have headed for the Cape, the White Mountains, or another summertime retreat in recent months. Or perhaps you’ve been busy looking for your next career challenge. Either way, with Labour Day fast approaching, we thought it’d be useful to tie together labour trends and some of the larger layoffs that have occurred at technology and life sciences firms in New England since Memorial Day.
First, it’s been amazing to see that our Boston Tech Layoff Tracker has not been as busy this summer as it was over the previous spring, winter, and fall seasons. Perhaps this is another sign that the worst of this economic recession has left us. Since June 1, we’ve seen that Massachusetts-based life sciences and tech firms announced a total of 718 jobs would be cut in their organizations.
Now, that doesn’t include the small start-ups we follow that have been cutting jobs without officially announcing the layoffs: For example, we reported this month that Chelmsford, MA-based online music start-up OurStage downsized its ranks from 38 to 17 workers last fall after some investment dollars failed to come through. But this summer’s layoff total to date marks a significant falloff from the 971 layoffs we recorded at Massachusetts life sciences and tech firms in the spring months of April and May.
We saw this year as a tough one for innovation companies here and everywhere, but layoffs seem to have sky-rocketed in the first quarter of this year. State figures show that the impact of layoffs among tech and life sciences workers in the Bay State is consistent with the impact on workers in the rest of the economy. (Of course, the state says that jobs in industries such as construction and financial services have been hit the hardest by layoffs in the commonwealth).
According to the most recent employment figures from the state’s Executive Office of Labour and Workforce Development, the number of professional, scientific, and technical jobs in the commonwealth fell from about 258,200 in June 2008 to 249,700 this June, a 3.29 percent decline. (Admittedly, these figures are just an indication and the job category the state uses is a generalization and does not reflect all the jobs in tech and life sciences firms).
The state labour agency stated that year-over-year employment levels for all non-farming jobs in June were down about 3.2 percent, meaning that the layoff trend has far from spared local innovation-based firms.
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