Tech job losses recall dark days

THE technology world has been shaken by the recent lay-offs at Stripe, the planned redundancies at Twitter and at Facebook’s owner Meta.

But if the technology world was shaken, then the Irish jobs sector was positively convulsing. The prominence of big international names in this country means the news made more headlines here than in most European countries. One can imagine little else is being talked about in the vicinity of Dublin’s docklands these days – ground zero for Ireland’s tech industry, with Google, Meta and Twitter all having their European headquarters there.

The industry has transformed the capital’s geography and created a whole new urban area where once was wasteland. But have we, yet again, put too many economic eggs into the one basket? What is currently happening in the tech sector here is sending shivers down the spines of anyone who remembers the terrifying days of the 90s and noughties, which saw several large computer firms pulling out of Ireland.

One of the first to go was Digital in Galway which left almost 800 workers in the city without jobs when they stopped manufacturing computers there in 1993.

Eight years later, the closure of Gateway in Dublin, which also manufactured computers, left 900 staff without work in a year that saw a massive 4,000 people losing their jobs in the tech sector in Ireland. In fact, things got so bad that year that the then-Tánaiste Mary Harney said the government would review its policy on issuing work visas to migrant workers if the numbers signing on the dole continued to increase. And in 2009, when Dell shocked Limerick by moving a whopping 1,900 jobs to Poland, the city felt it might never recover. But both did – and the company now employs over 5,500 people in Ireland.

What’s more, many of those who left the big tech companies in those dark days went on to start their own technology firms, and benefited from the rising tide of the sector in the intervening years. 

It’s worth noting that the decisions back then, though cruel, were mostly made by boards of directors and, on the whole, they tried to limit reputational damage to their firms by adhering, in most instances, to legislation and industrial relations protocol. But this month, it was the method of communication used by these modern tech firms that really irked observers.

Without any prior notice given to government, or statutory bodies, the word about Twitter jobs filtered through via social media itself, or in vulgar emails to personal addresses after staff realised they were locked out of their business email accounts. It seems that while the story of a tech sector rising, peaking and falling may not be all that different to the trajectory followed by the computer industry of the 90s and noughties, the methods of delivering bad news have most certainly changed.

There has even ben confusion over whether Twitter employees in this country were, in fact, fired at all, or just warned of the impending doom. 

But MEP Billy Kelleher seems to think they have. This week, demanding Twitter owner Elon Musk be brought before the Parliament to be questioned on his intentions, the MEP said: ‘I am incredibly concerned and angry about the manner in which Irish employees of Twitter were fired last week. We are not the United States. We respect workers and their rights.’

But the big question is, will these tech giants, often ruled by one ego-centric male, learn to respect their own workers, or have we indeed entered a new world where only the message matters, and not the manner of its delivery?