The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has reportedly prompted a new trend in the workforce called “silent firing,” Fast Company reports.
Silent firing is the inverse of quiet quitting, a trend that gained popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, where employees would do the bare minimum as a fast track to being fired with severance. The silent firing move is where employers are making jobs harder in hopes that people will quit so their positions will be automated.
Experts like George Kailas, CEO of Prospero.Ai, feel that certain employers are making the office experience unbearable on purpose, especially tech companies. “So when Amazon is pushing a five-day in-office workweek, despite the fact that 90% of their employees are “dissatisfied” and 73% are considering quitting, it doesn’t really fit with the “cool tech office” vibes of the past,” Kailas wrote.
“Maybe Amazon is silently firing workers by making the workplace inhospitable. Because the best way to decrease retention while saving on severance would be to remove remote work.”
Studies from Live Data Technologies show that employee growth of big tech companies has fluctuated over the past two years. In 2022, the count increased by 5% and then went down. The trend happened again in March 2024 as the hiring numbers went up again, only to decrease just two months later in May.
Artificial intelligence is blamed for the alarming numbers, but other experts aren’t buying it. According to the New York Post, MIT professor and economist Daron Acemoglu claims that only 5% of jobs can be replaced or work with AI over the next 10 years and states the technology is simply not reliable enough. “A lot of money is going to get wasted. “You’re not going to get an economic revolution out of that 5%,” Acemoglu said.
“You need highly reliable information or the ability of these models to faithfully implement certain steps that previously workers were doing. They can do that in a few places with some human supervisory oversight … but in most places they cannot.”
Kailas insists that nearly 18% of people who once worked for big tech companies between 2023 and 2024 are still unemployed since “AI is booming and the rest of the labor market is stagnant and/or declining if you look at the unemployment numbers.”
Lack of engagement may also contribute to those claims. Gallup survey results showed a 5% decrease in engagement among Gen Z and young millennials. Richard Wahlquist, CEO of the American Staffing Association, says that close to three in 10 employees overall aren’t actively engaged at work.
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