Amazon and Salesforce, makers of business software program, are the most recent US expertise firms to announce vital job cuts as they trim payrolls that grew quickly throughout the pandemic lockdown.
Amazon introduced on Wednesday that it’ll lay off roughly 18,000 workers. The layoffs are the most important within the firm’s historical past, although they characterize solely a small portion of its 1.5 million world workforce.
“Amazon has weathered unsure and tough economies up to now, and we are going to achieve this sooner or later,” CEO Andy Jassy said in a note to employees made public by the company. “With a stronger cost structure, we will be able to pursue our long-term opportunities.”
Which Departments of Amazon are Seeing Lay offs?
He acknowledged that the layoffs will primarily have an effect on the corporate’s bodily shops, which embody Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go, in addition to its PXT organisations, which deal with human assets and different features.
Jassy knowledgeable workers in November that layoffs had been on the way in which as a result of financial local weather and the corporate’s speedy hiring lately. Wednesday’s announcement included beforehand unnumbered job cuts. The firm has additionally provided voluntary buyouts and has diminished prices in different areas of its huge operation.
An worker scans packages at Amazon’s JFK8 distribution middle in Staten Island, New York, U.S. November 25, 2020. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid.
What About Salesforce?
Meanwhile, Salesforce introduced the layoff of roughly 8,000 workers, or 10% of its workforce.
The layoffs introduced on Wednesday are by far the most important within the firm’s 23-year historical past, based by former Oracle govt Marc Benioff. Benioff pioneered the tactic of leasing software program companies to internet-connected gadgets — an idea now often known as “cloud computing.”
The layoffs follow a reorganisation in Salesforce’s upper management. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
The layoffs follow a reorganisation in Salesforce’s upper management. Bret Taylor, Benioff’s hand-picked co-CEO and Twitter’s chairman at the time of Twitter’s tortuous $44 billion sale to billionaire Elon Musk, left Salesforce. Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Slack, then left. Salesforce paid nearly $28 billion for Slack two years ago.
According to the company, employees who lose their jobs will receive nearly five months of pay, health insurance, career resources, and other benefits. Amazon also stated that it is providing a separation payment, transitional health insurance benefits, and job placement assistance.
In a letter to employees, Benioff, now the sole CEO of Salesforce, said he blamed himself for the layoffs after continuing to hire aggressively throughout the pandemic, with millions of Americans working from home and demand for the company’s technology surging.
“As our revenue increased due to the pandemic, we hired too many people, which led to the economic downturn we’re now experiencing, and I accept responsibility for that,” Benioff stated.
A Pandemic Boom, Then Fall
Salesforce employed roughly 49,000 folks in January 2020, simply previous to the pandemic. Salesforce’s workforce continues to be 50% bigger as we speak than it was previous to the pandemic.
When saying in November that his firm would lay off 11,000 workers, or 13% of its workforce, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that he misinterpret the income beneficial properties that the proprietor of Facebook and Instagram was reaping throughout the pandemic.
Salesforce’s current decline from the heady days of the pandemic, like that of different main tech firms, has taken a big toll on its inventory. Prior to Wednesday’s announcement, shares had dropped greater than 50% from their peak close to $310 in November 2021. The inventory rose practically 4% on Wednesday, closing at $139.59.
“This is a brilliant poker transfer by Benioff to protect margins in an unsure backdrop,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives wrote.
Salesforce also announced on Wednesday that it will close some of its offices, but did not specify which ones. Since its completion in 2018, the company’s 61-story headquarters has been a prominent feature of the San Francisco skyline and a symbol of technology’s importance to the city.
What Do the Tech Layoffs Mean for Indian Workers?
A December 2022 report by India Today citing data from layoffs.fyi ( a crowdsourced database of tech layoffs) said over 2 lakh employees have been laid off by around 1,400 tech companies since the start of Covid-19. The data also revealed that while 2022 will have been the worst year for the tech sector, and early 2023 may be even worse for tech workers.
By mid-November, more than 73,000 workers in the US tech sector had been laid off by companies such as Meta, Twitter, Salesforce, Netflix, and others. Meanwhile, over 17,000 tech workers in India have been laid off, the report said.
Layoffs in technology began around the first half of the year and will continue throughout the year. According to reports, tech layoffs will worsen in the first half of 2023. Several major technology companies, including Meta, Amazon, Twitter, and Netflix, among others, have already laid off hundreds of thousands of workers through 2022.
A Precarious Situation for Tech Visa Workers
A report in the Guardian by Johana Bhuiyan on the plight of non-citizens who are facing layoffs in the tech sector in US, explained how immigrant tech workers on temporary visas have always had fewer options than green card holders or citizens because their visas, and thus their ability to work in the United States, are tied to their employers.
Even when done voluntarily, changing jobs can be a risk, literally in some cases, she wrote. Workers on H-1B visas, for example, must find a new employer willing to apply for and sponsor a new H-1B visa. When an application is submitted to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), it is entered into a lottery to determine which applications will be considered. If their application is chosen in the lottery, USCIS will decide whether or not to grant them H-1B status.
This thorny and complex system frequently leaves people with H-1B visas feeling trapped in their current position, unwilling to risk losing their status by switching to another company. Those who are laid off must navigate the same system, but with the added pressure of finding another job within 60 days, the report said.
Being laid off can be a devastating setback for those on the path to obtaining a green card. Depending on how far they progressed in the often years-long application process, they may have to start over. Employers of H-1B workers can apply for a green card on their behalf through a three-step process that includes testing the labour market to demonstrate that no US workers are available to fill their positions. The green card system, like the H-1B process, is a lottery, but it is quota-based. The United States sets a quota for the number of green cards granted to citizens of each country. Because of the large number of immigrants from India and China, where many tech workers come from, there is a years-long backlog for green cards for those workers.
“Some people predict that if you were born in India and the job you’re applying for only requires a bachelor’s degree, for example, it may take a decade to get through that process,” Kristi Nevarez, a companion at regulation agency Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy LLP informed the Guardian.
With inputs from the Associated Press
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