DENVER (KDVR) — If you’re feeling anxious about layoffs, you’re not alone. Denver is among the most anxiety-ridden areas in the U.S. when it comes to layoff fears, which is on par with New York City, according to a new study.
Amid recession fears and the broader impacts of national inflation, U.S. workers in tech fields have been rocked by slates of industry layoffs in the past year. Companies formerly famous for providing lucrative golden ticket employment have slashed up to a third of their employees from payrolls. These include Zoom, Yahoo, Twitter, Amazon, Microsoft, Google parent company Alphabet, Twilio, GitHub and Meta, among others.
Collectively, tech companies have laid off at least 233,000 workers in 2022 and 2023, according to tech news site Crunchbase.
The banking and finance industry has not yet had the same deep layoffs, but experts warn they are in the works. Banks including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse and Bank of America have laid off thousands, and others plan on the same.
Colorado has attracted these kinds of workers over the last decade, particularly since the COVID pandemic sparked a national relocation shuffle. The Denver area has one of the highest rates of layoff-anxious workers, according to an analysis from financial advisor SmartAsset.
SmartAsset analyzed 94 metro areas’ Google Trend information to see which cities had the most people searching for “layoffs,” “severance pay,” “recession,” “downsizing,” “unemployment benefits” and “furlough.” Analysts took the average portion these terms made of all Google searches and assigned each city a score.
The Denver-Aurora-Lakewood metro ranked 15th, ahead even of the tech and finance-rich employment hub of the New York City metro.
Denver is one of the few middle-American cities that had such a high share of anxious searching. Most of the others are concentrated along the coasts or in large Texas cities. The San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle and Austin metros had the highest rankings.