Google parent company to lay off 12K workers, unclear how that will affect Pittsburgh office

Google’s parent company announced Friday that the tech giant plans to lay off about 12,000 employees across its workforce.

Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, reported in October that it employed nearly 187,000 people globally.

Pittsburgh is home to a Google office in Pittsburgh’s Larimer neighborhood. It’s unclear how the broad-based layoffs will affect the Pittsburgh workforce.

According to an April 2022 statement from Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey, Pittsburgh’s Google office employs more than 800 people.

Last year, Google announced a $15 million expansion in Pennsylvania, including an expansion of its Pittsburgh office space at Bakery Square. This was a part of a larger, $9.5 billion expansion throughout the United States. Last year’s stated goals by Google included creating 12,000 jobs.

When contacted, Google pointed to its blog post from CEO Sundar Pichai that announced the layoffs. It said the company wouldn’t be commenting further when asked whether the layoffs would affect Pittsburgh.

In his blog post, Pichai said Google sent an email to affected employees in the United States. He said the company experienced dramatic growth over the past few years, but that growth overshot the current global economic situation.

“Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth,” Pichai wrote. “To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.”

Google joins a list of tech companies that are contracting their workforces, potentially out of fear that a recession could hit the country.

Google employs contract workers at its offices in Pittsburgh. Those 65 workers were contracted through HCL America Inc. and unionized with United Steelworkers in 2021, becoming one of the first groups of unionized tech workers in the country.

USW representatives said it’s unclear if the Google layoffs will affect the unionized workers.

Pittsburgh has seen some job losses recently in the tech industry.

In October 2022, the autonomous vehicle company Argo AI shut down, leading to the closure of its Pittsburgh offices. At one point, Argo AI employed 1,700 workers in Pittsburgh.

Facebook’s parent company Meta also faced layoffs in late 2022, but it’s unclear how that affected Meta offices in Pittsburgh, which are home to some of its virtual reality research facilities.