People are saying that Meta's motivation is to avoid unemployment payments, etc. In the U.S., an employer pays a small tax/fee to the state labor department, w

People are saying that Meta's motivation is to avoid unemployment payments, etc. In the U.S., an employer pays a small tax/fee to the state labor department, which administers unemployment. The employer's fee is calculated like an insurance premium, so every terminated employee who claims unemployment increases the employer's costs by a little bit. A single terminated employee will increase a large company's UI fee the next year by less than a dollar, because the fee is based on unemployment benefits, not the employee's salary (so having super-highly paid employees doesn't make a difference). Terminated employees qualify for unemployment unless they are terminated for-cause, meaning a violation of the law, employment agreement, or employee handbook. Termination for low performance is not "for cause" in any state, and employer who claims such is committing labor fraud for which the minimum fine per violation is in the thousands of tens of thousands (depending on the state)...on top of exposing themselves to significant legal liability to the terminated employee (back pay plus additional damages for any financial harm suffered from the employee's loss of access to unemployment. TLDR: in the context of unemployment expenses, the risk-adjusted benefit of mislabeling an employee's cause for termination is not worth it. Also important, "low performance" is not an excuse to violate the WARN Act; any mass termination of employees (excluding those terminated for cause) that satisfies the threshold will trigger WARN ACT responsibilities (meaning, 60 days notice or 60 days' pay to waive notice). A number of states also have their own versions of the WARN Act which might impose additional responsibilities on the employer. The penalty for violating the WARN Act is up to 60 days pay and benefits, with interest; some states have additional penalties on top of that, such as a $500 fine/day/location for the notice-failure period. So Meta's not laying people off and calling them "low performers" to minimize their unemployment costs because it won't. As others have pointed out in other threads, most of the employees laid off were involved in diversity efforts in some manner, and now that Zuckerberg has gone far-right and embraced Trump, he's laying these employees off and calling them "low performing" to curry favor with his new billionaire buddy (look at the language Trump uses when he fires someone). It's unlikely that Meta is trying to replace the terminated employees with cheaper H1Bs because part of the GOP's Project 2025 plan is to eliminate the H1B program entirely.