Amazon
Amazon is offering French employees up to a year’s pay to get them jobs as the tech giant struggles to cut thousands of workers in the European Union.
Bloomberg reported that the online retailer is trying to get senior managers to leave voluntarily by offering generous payoffs. Google is also offering similar great severance deals in France.
Tech giants are struggling to make people redundant as a result of tougher employment laws in Europe, prompting many to offer sweeteners to encourage people to leave.
In response to the slowdown in digital advertising, Google is in the process of cutting 6pc of its global workforce, or about 12,000 people.
Meanwhile, Amazon has announced two rounds of job cuts, laying off 18,000 people in January and 9,000 last month. The company’s growth has slowed after the pandemic-enforced lockdown ended.
Many American employees working for both businesses have already been given their marching orders. Companies in the US can lay off large numbers of employees with very little pushback.
However, stricter employment laws in the European Union force businesses to jump through more hoops if they want to make people redundant.
Google is currently in talks with employee works councils in France and Germany, negotiating deals with them before implementing the job cuts.
A Google spokesperson told Bloomberg: “We are carefully and individually working through each country where the cuts are taking place to fully comply with local legal requirements, which vary per location, It is complicated, and takes time.
Amazon was contacted for comment.
Google is planning to lay off around 500 of its 8,000 employees in the UK, according to union Unite.
In the first three months of the year, nearly 42,000 people lost their jobs in tech, according to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks redundancy news.
At Twitter, Elon Musk has laid off more than half of its 7,500 employees since taking over the social network last year.
In one case in Dublin, a Twitter executive obtained a High Court injunction against the tech company to prevent it from locking him out of its internal systems. The employee argued that Twitter did not go through a proper redundancy process.
Source: uk.finance.yahoo.com
