Salesforce (CRM) has joined a now long list of companies that announced layoffs in the tech sector. According to data from Layoffs.fyi, the announcement brings the total number of layoffs in the tech sector 24,000 so far in 2024. Should others in the tech industry take this as a sign of things to come?

University of Michigan's Ford School Professor of Public Policy and Economics Betsey Stevenson joins Yahoo Finance to discuss the status of the labor trends in large tech companies.

Stevenson puts the current market in historical context, reminding that the tech sector over hired during the pandemic.

"It's obviously not as booming as a labor market as it was... a year and a half ago, but the question will be, is this tech sector a canary in the coal mine? Or is this more re-allocation to places where we need people more than we need them in the tech sector?" Stevenson states. "I think we do still have a healing economy, so I feel very confident that people are going to be reabsorbed into other parts of the labor market."

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Editor's note: This article was written by Nicholas Jacobino

Video Transcript

- Salesforce, the latest tech giant, to join the list of companies announcing layoffs this year. More than 23,000 tech workers have been laid off thus far in 2024. It's the most since March of 2023. That, according to data from Layoffs.fyi.

Here with what, if anything, this signals for the labor market, we're welcoming in Betsey Stevenson, professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan. Betsey, it's great to see you. As we try to sort of decipher where the labor market is now and where it's going, how should we read these public layoff announcements when we're trying to extrapolate what's going on under the surface?

BETSEY STEVENSON: You know, I think it's incredibly difficult to look at a single company or even a handful of companies layoff notices and make-- draw conclusions about the broader economy. Let's step back and put it in perspective. Every single week in a booming economy like we've had, roughly 200,000 people lose their job and are able to file for the very first time for unemployment insurance.

So the numbers you're talking about are still small. And relative to that 200,000, to give you another way to put it in perspective, every month, about a million and a half people are laid off in the US economy when the US economy is doing well.

So in a normal economy, we have a lot of movement. And in fact, that's actually one of the strengths of the US economy, that there are people who get new jobs. There's new opportunities. You know, there's 8 million jobs open right now.