“Controlling labor costs via periodic layoffs is like breathing for Silicon Valley: cyclical, necessary for life,” Malcolm Harris, author of the forthcoming book “Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism and the World,” told me. The layoffs, Harris says, have “very little to do with long- or even medium-term strategy except as it pertains to cultivating an insecure workforce.”
https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-01-30/column-how-big-tech-is-using-mass-layoffs-to-bring-workers-to-heel