The pace of layoffs planned in the Bay Area eased dramatically in June, official state filings show, offering a hopeful sign for a regional economy that has been bludgeoned by coronavirus-linked business shutdowns ordered by government agencies.
The overall picture for job cuts in the nine-county region also contained details of staffing reductions being planned by Intuit, the Bay Club, CorePower Yoga, and other companies, according to layoff notices posted with the state’s Employment Development Department.
During June, Bay Area companies revealed plans for a combined total of about 19,500 layoffs, information posted on the EDD website shows.
The June totals were down dramatically from the 46,400 in planned layoffs that were disclosed to the EDD in May, which equates to a 58 percent decline, this news organization’s analysis of the EDD filings shows.
The WARN notices do not provide a complete picture of the employment situation in the Bay Area. The filings give no information about hiring by companies and don’t detail all the job cuts in the region. The WARN notices primarily serve to indicate the pace of job cuts in the area as well as sketch out details of local staffing reductions.
The layoff totals in June were 74 percent below the 74,200 layoffs that were posted by the EDD in April, which was the peak month for job cuts amid the business shutdowns due to the coronavirus.
However, the June staffing reductions were 40 percent higher than the 13,900 layoffs that the EDD posted during March. Plus, the layoffs in March, April, May, and June were all several times greater than the 3,000 layoffs detailed in the WARN notices for January and the 2,400 in February, the EDD filings show.
The batches of WARN notices for late June also revealed staffing cutbacks planned by Bay Area employers in an array of industries.
Intuit revealed in a WARN notice in late June that it planned to permanently lay off about 189 workers in Mountain View in a staffing reduction scheduled for Aug. 21. These staffing reductions were part of job cuts that Intuit announced in a June 22 blog post that were expected to total 715 worldwide.
The Bay Club, a sports and fitness center, disclosed plans to reduce staffing by 923 positions in the Bay Area. These included 294 jobs in Los Gatos, 255 jobs in Pleasanton, and 197 positions in Fremont. All of these were described as permanent layoffs.
CorePower Yoga, a yoga-themed fitness studio, revealed it planned to temporarily lay off 430 employees, including 243 in San Jose and 187 in Palo Alto.
Akima Infrastructure Services, which recruits contract workers for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, reported to the EDD that it had decided on permanent layoffs of about 500 people in Livermore.
Next week, the state EDD will release the most complete snapshot of the Bay Area economy when the state labor agency posts the June employment report for California and each of the state’s metro regions, including the Bay Area.
