|
Listen to this article here
|
Sign-Up for a free subscription to The Black Wall Street Times‘ daily newsletter, Black Editors’ Edition (BEE) – our curated news selections & opinions by us for you.
American tech companies are purging themselves of their employees at a record rate, leaving employees and families without stability as the holiday season approaches.
Amazon announced in a blog post its plans to lay off up to 10,000 employees. According to Forbes, the cuts will primarily focus on money-draining units, such as Amazon voice-assistant Alexa and ebook-reader Kindle. Human resources will also be impacted, indicating that hiring will slow down compared to the aggressive staffing that took place over the last several years. Warehouse workers were also impacted. One documented how the stunning news was delivered.
Although the 10,000 is staggering, it still only represents 1% of Amazon’s more than 1.5 million workers, including hourly warehouse employees.
As tech companies fire workers, only Twitter does so in embarrassing fashion
Elon Musk already laid off half the company’s 7,500 full-time employees on November 4, reportedly cut thousands of contractors last weekend, and fired several employees who had criticized him publicly.
On Wednesday, the offices of Twitter announced they’ll be closed to all employees until Monday, November 21 as the company deals with mass staff walk-outs in response to Musk’s ultimatum to either quit or work in the “extremely hardcore” Twitter 2.0 with “long hours at high intensity.”
In an internal email to staff, Elon Musk wrote: “Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”
Activist projects messages to Elon Musk at Twitter HQ tonight in San Francisco.
— Watcher.Guru (@WatcherGuru) November 18, 2022
Without the public shame, other tech companies have also made decisions to make sweeping cuts. According to Market Screener, Carvana Co will lay off 1,500, or 8%, of its workforce, a CNBC reporter said in a tweet on Friday.
Meta, the parent company of the social networking site Facebook, has had the largest downsizing round so far. On November 9, 11,000 employees were terminated from the company. Amazon fired 10,000 people on November 16.
Even before Amazon began laying off about 10,000 corporate employees on Wednesday, the job-loss numbers within the tech sector were grim, according to Slate. Just recently: Stripe and Microsoft and Snap all axed about 1,000 employees each, Salesforce and Zillow let go of hundreds of workers. According to data gathered by the website Layoffs.fyi, at least 86,700 tech jobs within the U.S. have been lost this year alone.
Comments are closed.