Amazon offers French staff a year’s pay to get them to quit
Amazon is offering French staff up to a year's pay to get them to leave as the tech giant struggles to cut thousands of workers in the EU.
The online retailer has been trying to tempt senior managers into voluntarily quitting by offering the generous payoffs, Bloomberg reported. Google is also offering similarly lavish 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 encouraging people to leave.
Google is in the process of cutting 6pc of its global workforce, or around 12,000 people, in response to a slowdown in digital advertising.
Amazon, meanwhile, has announced two rounds of job cuts, laying off 18,000 people in January and a further 9,000 last month. The company's growth has slowed after pandemic-enforced lockdowns came to an end.
Many US staff working for both businesses have already been given their marching orders. Companies can cut large numbers of staff with little pushback in the US.
However, stricter employment laws in the EU 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, bargaining with them ahead of implementing job reductions.
A Google spokesman denied suggestions that it was "adjusting numbers or not making reductions in European countries to meet targets".
A spokesman said: "We have been working carefully and individually through each country where reductions are taking place to fully adhere to local legal requirements, which vary per location, are complex, and take time.
“As planned, the processes in France and Germany are ongoing due to local labor laws, and as planned, we are not reducing our workforce at all in Austria, Romania or Greece. We know this is a difficult time, and we're offering generous packages and transition support for impacted employees in line with local practices in each country.”
Amazon was contacted for comment.
Google is planning to lay off around 500 of its 8,000 staff in the UK, according to the union Unite.
Approximately 42,000 people lost their jobs in tech across Europe in the first three months of the year, according to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks redundancy news.
At Twitter, Elon Musk has laid off more than half of its 7,500 staff since taking over the social network last year.
In one case in Dublin, a Twitter executive secured a high court injunction against the tech company to stop it locking her out of its internal systems. The employee in question argued Twitter had not gone through a proper redundancy process.
