New York (EFE).- The Walt Disney Company has confirmed today that it continues with its plan for staggered layoffs of 7,000 employees, close to 3% of its workforce, as part of a reduction plan of 5,500 million dollars (5,095 million euros) in costs that it announced last February.
At the end of March, the company’s top executive, Bob Iger, assured his employees in a message that the layoffs would begin effectively.
Today, in statements collected by specialized media, Walt Disney’s top executive assured that the second round of layoffs will begin this Monday, which once it is completed will have left a total of 4,000 workers out of the company.
The executive had already announced that a second group of workers would be notified of the layoffs in April and that the latest contract terminations would be communicated to those affected at the beginning of the summer.
“We made the difficult decision to reduce our global workforce by approximately 7,000 jobs as part of a strategic realignment of the company, which includes significant cost-saving measures necessary to create a more efficient, coordinated and streamlined approach to our business,” he said then. iger.
Disney announced the layoffs in February to coincide with its quarterly results, in which it reported a loss of 2.4 million subscribers to its Disney+ streaming service.
After the announcement of the first round of cuts, it was learned that one of the affected departments was metaverse, which had 50 workers and was dismantled, as reported by The Wall Street Journal at the time.
Disney is not alone: the wave of layoffs does not stop
Just a few days ago, the list of companies announcing the reduction of their workforces continued to grow, including names like Lyft or BuzzFeed.
The car-sharing company with a chauffeur Lyft confirmed last Friday that it will lay off 13% of its workforce, a move that it justifies by “the likely recession sometime next year.”
In a letter to the employees that several US media reproduce today, the president John Zimmer and the executive director Logan Green point out that the layoffs, which are also attributed to the rise in insurance prices, will affect all departments, which add up in total 5,000 employees.
The batch of layoffs was already leaked to various media last November and is in addition to the one that the company undertook in May 2020, when it announced that it would not renew 1,000 jobs, while announcing salary cuts for all categories, including senior managers. .
For its part, BuzzFeed told its staff on Thursday that it had decided to shut down its news portal, BuzzFeed News, created more than a decade ago and which has become one of the most influential news outlets in the new digital landscape.
The move is part of a larger plan that will cut BuzzFeed’s headcount by about 15%, according to an internal message from the company’s CEO, Jonah Peretti.
“Although the layoffs will occur in nearly every division, we have determined that the company can no longer continue to fund BuzzFeed News as an independent organization,” Peretti explained.
BuzzFeed – born in 2006 and which has based its success on viral content such as lists, quizzes and entertainment articles – launched its news portal in 2011, which has since operated as a media outlet on its own.