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"Copycat layoffs" is the idea that companies are being influenced by one another as they cut jobs.
Since the start of 2023, numerous tech companies have laid off workers, including Google, Microsoft, and Zoom, picking up on job cuts that started in the second half of 2022.
Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, attributed the layoffs to "copycat behavior" in an interview with Stanford News in December.
"A lot of this is just imitation," Pfeffer told Insider. "We see one company doing something and everybody follows. They followed on the way up; companies were hiring, so everybody decided to hire. Now, companies are laying off, and everybody decided to follow each other and lay people off."
Two months into 2023, the term "copycat layoffs" may have earned its place as a workplace buzzword, according to Kathryn Minshew, founder and CEO of The Muse, a Gen Z and millennial-focused job search platform.
"It's difficult without being inside those companies to really point a finger at why these tech companies are shutting people," Minshew said. "But when many companies in an industry make the same decision in a short period of time it certainly starts to look like they're being influenced by each other."