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How Bad Is This Current White Collar Recession?

It’s ugly for high earners but probably won’t have a big impact on the broader economy

I’ve been hearing the phrase white collar recession a lot over the past few months. My LinkedIn feed has also been filled with posts about lay offs as well as exceedingly long job hunts (e.g. 500 plus applications, 8 months, and still no offers). Yet when you check the unemployment rate, at 4.2% it’s still sitting near cyclical lows.

So what’s going on? Why do things seem so much worse when you look at the anecdotes versus when you look at the data? And should we be worried? Let’s start with some numbers and facts. Here’s the tech industry layoff stats according to Layoffs.fyi:

• 2022: 1064 companies laid off 165 thousand workers (on average, each company laid off 155 people).
• 2023: 1193 companies laid off 264 thousand workers (on average, each company laid off 221 people). This was the year where big tech realized it had over-hired during the pandemic and decided it was time to trim the fat.
• 2024: Thus far, 449 companies have laid off 138 thousand workers (on average, each company laid off 307 people).

The trend is interesting — while 2024 looks like it will end with fewer overall job losses than…