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High inflation and the fallout from the war in Ukraine have pressured many companies to consider laying off staff or freezing hiring, after the labor market had been hit by a labor crisis in previous months.
After a frantic year-and-a-half search for workers to meet growing demand from shoppers, America’s retail stores are beginning to change their mindsets.
The easing of their plans comes as they grapple with a decline in consumer spending, the prospect of an economic downturn and rising labor costs. Some even suggest that employers have learned to do more with fewer workers.
The Labor Department on Friday, July 8, noted that employers added 372,000 jobs in June, a surprisingly strong gain and in line with the pace of the previous two months. Individually, however, many companies are tempering their plans. And it’s not just retailers.
From Facebook, to Twitter, through Uber and Tesla
In late June, Facebook parent Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg slashed his plans to hire engineers by at least 30% this year, saying he was preparing for a deep economic downturn.
“If I had to bet, I’d say this could be one of the worst recessions we’ve seen in recent history,” Zuckerberg told workers in a weekly employee question-and-answer session, the audio of which was heard by Reuters.
Meta had initially said it would hire 10,000 new engineers this year. Now his target is between 6,000 and 7,000.
Uber told Reuters in May that it was cutting hiring and spending on its marketing and incentive activities, and Netflix said it had laid off about 150 people, most of them in the United States, as the streaming service company faces a growth slowdown.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal sent out a memo announcing that it would stop hiring and review existing job postings to determine if any “should be pulled.”
The nation’s top employer, Walmart, recently acknowledged that it overhired due to staffing shortages following the Covid-19 pandemic and was later forced to cut its number of employees.
In April, e-commerce giant Amazon said it was overworked in its warehouses. And one of its suppliers, FedEx, revealed in late June that it was hiring fewer people.
Warner Bros Discovery is said to be looking to cut up to 30% or almost 1,000 jobs in its global advertising sales team. For its part, the retail equity trading platform Robinhood announced that it would lay off around 9% of its full-time employees.
And after a huge boom in the pandemic, the luxury car giant Tesla could see a 10% cut in its staff, as announced by its president Elon Musk, considered the richest man in the world.
With Reuters and AP
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