The technology industry is not going through its best moment. Spotify announced last Monday the dismissal of 600 workers from its workforce. This was announced by Daniel Ek, co-founder and CEO of the famous streaming music platform.
The Swedish multinational has around 9,800 full-time employees worldwide. This movement will mean the departure of about 600 workers. Thus, they are reducing their employee base by about 6% across the company.
This staff cut has already been communicated to the US regulator (the SEC), and also to the company’s employees, who have received a note from the CEO. In the message, shared by the company on its website, Daniel Ek justifies his decision in the problems to consolidate the growth that occurred during the pandemic, since they invested before the increase in income: “Like many other leaders, I expected to sustain the strong tailwinds of the pandemic, and I believed that our vast global business and lower risk of the impact of a slowdown in ads would insulate us.”
Those laid off will receive approximately five months of compensation. This will be calculated based on local notice period requirements and employee tenure. All accrued and unused vacation will be paid. In addition, they will keep their health insurance for a while and will have the option of being relocated for two months.
Mass layoffs in the tech industry
In this way, Spotify is the latest technology company to announce layoffs. Since November of last year, there have been job cuts in large companies such as Amazon, which pointed to 18,000 the number of workers it would dispense with worldwide. This equates to 6% of their entire workforce. After this, Microsoft announced that it would lay off 10,000 employees, less than 5% of the workforce.
Last week, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced that it will reduce its workforce by about 12,000 people. For his part, Goal announced the layoff of 11,000 employees worldwide, 13% of its workforce.