US TOP Companies Layoff Shows Economy Slowdown
Amazon, Lyft, Stripe buckle down included
Separate tech staffing announcements today raised concerns about what has been a stubbornly healthy labour market.
Driving the News: Amazon announced a hiring freeze, while Lyft, Stripe, and Chime all announced layoffs due to economic concerns.
Stripe Lays Off More Than 1,000 Workers, 14% Of Staff
In a staff memo, co-founders John Zimmer and Logan Green blamed inflation and a slowing economy, according to Bloomberg.
US Economy
Meanwhile, Stripe, an e-commerce payment processor, announced on Thursday that it would lay off approximately 14% of its workforce.
Its management overestimated the internet economy's near-term growth and underestimated the impact of a broader slowdown, according to the company.
"The world is shifting once more," CEO Patrick Collison wrote in an email to employees. "We are confronted with persistent inflation, energy shocks, higher interest rates, reduced investment budgets, and scarcer startup funding."
Chime, a fintech that relies heavily on millennial spending, told CNBC that it planned to lay off 12% of its 1,300-person workforce.
Amazon halts hiring for corporate workforce
Amazon will halt hiring for new positions in its corporate workforce for the "next few months" due to the economy being "in an uncertain place," the company said in a memo on Wednesday.
Why it is significant:
According to the New York Times, the company announced last month that it would freeze corporate hiring in its retail business for the rest of the year.
It claimed that the corporate hiring halt was also necessary due to the large number of people hired in recent years. What they're saying: "In light of how many people we've hired in the last few years," Amazon's senior vice president of people experience and technology, Beth Galetti, "decided this week to pause on new incremental hires in our corporate workforce."
According to Galetti, the team expects to keep the freeze in place for the next few months and adjust depending on the state of the economy and business.
"We will hire backfills to replace employees who move on to new opportunities," Galetti said, adding that Amazon and would continue "incrementally" hiring in some areas.
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