Google May Be Quietly Laying Off At Least 10,000 Employees: Report

Washington, D.C. - Google may be handing out pink slips to several thousands of workers, according to a report citing un-named sources. Based on WebGuild's report, Google Inc (GOOG) may be quietly laying off up to 10,000 employees as a part of its efforts to streamline its operations and cost reduction.

"Since August, hundreds of employees have been laid off and there are reports that about 500 of them were recruiters for Google," the report posted on Nov. 23 claims. As of September 30, 2008, we had 20,123 employees located around the world.

The company is supposed to report layofffs. The report said that Google has categorized as many as 10,000 of the employees as "temporary operational expenses."

WebGuild President Daya Baran says, "Google has hundreds of lawyers figuring out how not to get caught. One of them is by moving workers from job to job every few months so that their status remains temporary. That is why you probably have never spoken to the same person twice at Google and that is also why there is somebody new on the job and most times you know more about their job than they do."

In the third quarter, Google reported revenues of $5.54 billion for the quarter ended September 30, 2008, an increase of 31% compared to the third quarter of 2007 and an increase of 3% compared to the second quarter of 2008.

"We had a good third quarter with strong traffic and revenue growth across all of our major geographies thanks to the underlying strength of our core search and ads business. The measurability and ROI of search-based advertising remain key assets for Google," Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, said in a statement.

Click Here for WebGuild's Report.