Google Gives the Ol’ Heave Ho to 225 Workers in Chelsea and D.T.

The new wave of layoffs nationwide has hit at least one of the big tech titans with a big New York footprint and Chelsea and D.T. will only be hit with layoffs of just under 2 percent of its 11,556 person workforce in the city.

Google said it will begin laying off 225 from four different locations in Manhattan, according to WARN [Workers Adjustment and Retraining Notices] notices filed with the New York State Department of Labor on January 23.

The biggest hit, not surprisingly, is coming at Google’s Ninth Ave. NYC HQ at 76 Ninth Ave. in Chelsea where 181 of the 7,471 employees are getting pink slips.

Across the street, at 75 Ninth Ave., another 30 of the 2,029 workers are being laid off.

Further downtown, only three of the 471 workers at the satellite office at 29 Eleventh Ave. are getting laid off while 11 of the 1,585 workers at 85 Tenth Ave.

In contrast to last year’s tech cuts, the layoffs in New York City do not appear to be as deep as the cuts in the rest of the company, where 12,000 Google employees in total are being laid off, amounting to six percent of the global workforce.

Amazon, which reported late last year that it plans to chop 18,000 workers in total is laying off 229 in New York City, according to WARN notices filed with the NYS Labor Department, from six facilities at JFK Airport and one at Laguardia Airport. The overall cuts amount to 1.2 percent of the more than 1.5 million employees at the online retail giant.

Microsoft said it was cutting 10,000 employees or 5 percent of its workforce. While it does have offices in Manhattan, it had not filed a WARN notice with the Labor Department but it was not clear if that is because the grim reapers had passed over the NYC offices or if the company was just lax in filing its notice with the Labor Dept.

In a memo announcing the cuts on Jan. 20, Google CEO Sundar Pichal said the economy has changed drastically from several years ago when tech companies were still expanding rapidly during the COVID pandemic.

“We’ve decided to reduce our workforce by approximately 12,000 roles,” said Pichal in the memo announcing the cuts to staffers. “This will mean saying goodbye to some incredibly talented people we worked hard to hire and have loved working with. I’m deeply sorry for that. The fact that these changes will impact the lives of Googlers weighs heavily on me, and I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here.”

Pichal said, “Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.

The layoffs in New York are slated to take place between April 1, and May 27, according to the WARN notice.