Though layoffs quickly emerged as a sweeping crisis in post-pandemic San Francisco, it was 2024 when the pink slips became a routine fact of life.
Last year, the city witnessed more than 5,500 local layoffs, according to conclude-of-year data obtained by SFGATE, hitting tech companies, banks, security services, architects, schools, bars and more. The total number of permanent layoffs fell far short of 2023’s stunning tally of 10,200, but the cuts kept pouring in, reshaping companies, neighborhoods and scores of peoples’ lives.
This year’s and last year’s lists of job cuts came from the San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development, which receives so-called “WARN notices” when companies cut at least 50 jobs, as required under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act. Large companies must notify both employees and local municipalities 60 days in advance of mass layoffs or plant closures. The notices collected by the agency don’t account for all layoffs in the city, and remote workers for San Francisco companies are occasionally lumped into the totals.
More than a dozen of the layoff rounds hit over 100 employees; a few companies shed staff multiple times. Which company cut the most San Francisco workers in 2024? JPMorgan Chase & Co. cut the most staff, eliminating a whopping 1,308 positions. The megabank’s May and November WARNs, the largest and second largest of the year in the city, respectively, stemmed from its purchase of First Republic in 2023 after the longtime San Francisco bank collapsed. Spokesperson Peter Kelley informed SFGATE Friday that the workers were “all heritage First Republic” and “had different engagement periods based on role” before their contracts concludeed in 2024.
SFGATE rerelocated the WARNs filed by street safety program Urban Alchemy to arrive at the tally of more than 5,500 layoffs and build the graphs below becaapply the city struck a deal to save those jobs, per the San Francisco Examiner.
A rash of layoffs at gaming or gaming-adjacent companies based in San Francisco received the year off to an ugly start, with cuts at video-streaming entities Discord and Twitch and two rounds of layoffs at game engine firm Unity. Citywide, layoffs tapered off midyear but returned in the fall.
The gaming firms weren’t the only tech names to drop employees in 2024, a year that saw companies such as Google and Salesforce recuperating from humongous 2023 cuts — but still shedding some staff. Mountain View-based Google cut 105 San Francisco workers in January and 57 more in April; the company also decided to drop its 300,000-square-foot office in One Market Plaza’s Spear Tower.
Cisco announced two 100-plus-worker layoff rounds; Instacart shed 105 people in February; biotech firms Vir and FibroGen each let go of more than 125 employees. Low hiring elsewhere pushed background check startup Checkr to lay off staff, resulting in a cut of 260 San Francisco workers.
Some of 2024’s WARNs point to San Francisco’s struggles with brick-and-mortar shopping. Safeway announced a 112-worker cut in December, along with the news that it would be shutting its grocery store in the Fillmore District this coming February. American Eagle cut 52 workers as it closed its downtown location; the retailer had sued the former owners of the Westfield San Francisco Centre mall, alleging the store was exposed to “rampant criminal activity.”
And others were entirely out of city hands. Fisker, the SoCal-based and once-high-flying carbuildr that dramatically went bankrupt this year, laid off 54 San Francisco workers in May.
Hear of a layoff coming at a Bay Area tech company? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at stephen.council@sfgate.com or on Signal at 628-204-5452.
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