This year is marked by the effects of the crisis and the astronomical losses of large companies in various sectors. The technologies did not escape and it is expected that 2008 will end with a total of 180 thousand redundancies, a number that is too high but less than the values registered during the boom of the Web, when almost 700 thousand IT employees were unemployed.
The consultant Challenger Gray & Christmas reports that until October 31 this year, 140.42 thousand employees were dismissed from the telecommunications, electronics and computing sectors, 69.654 thousand of whom in the third quarter of the year. The biggest cut this year was from HP, with 24,600 employees to be laid off after the completion of the purchase of EDS for 13.9 billion dollars.
This number does not include the amounts for layoffs announced by Sun MicroSystems at the end of the same month, when the world learned that the technology would lay off between 5,000 and 6,000 workers.
A similar crisis occurred in 2003, when the industry announced a total of redundancies in the order of 230 thousand employees. After that year, the numbers were never so high: 107 thousand dismissals in 2007, 131 thousand in 2006 and 174 thousand in 2005.
