Uber began another round of layoffs on Monday, a source with knowledge of the situation tells Business Insider.
On Monday morning, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi announced the plans in an email to staff Monday: 3,000 jobs cut and 45 offices shuttered.
As Business Insider previously reported, at the global all-hands meeting about two weeks ago, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told employees that it was finalizing layoff plans and staff would know about them within two weeks. The next day, it cut 3,700 employees. And now it has executed its second round of these planned layoffs, sources familiar with Uber's plans say.
Uber employed 28,600 global employees — 16,200 outside the United States — as of March 31, it said in an its last quarterly report filed to the SEC on May 8. The 3,700 jobs cut earlier this month accounted for about 14% of its total workforce, the company said.
"As you would expect, the company is looking at every possible scenario to ensure we get to the other side of this crisis in a stronger position than ever," a spokesperson said.
If Khosrowshahi and team are not considering more layoffs after this second round, then that two week-time frame that he warned about would be complete. However, sources at Uber that Business Insider has talked to are not convinced the layoffs are over, particularly if the reported acquisition of Grubhub occurs. In that case, Uber will almost certainly cut jobs as it consolidates overlapping roles within Uber Eats and Grubhub.
At the last all-hands meeting, Uber discussed the severance package being offered to the current crop of laid off employees: 10 weeks of pay and healthcare paid until the end of 2020, the source familiar said.
"I will not make any claims with absolute certainty regarding our future," Khosrowshahi wrote in his email on Monday, shared with the Wall Street Journal."I will tell you, however, that we are making really, really hard choices now, so that we can say our goodbyes, have as much clarity as we can, move forward, and start to build again with confidence."
Units expected to be cutting employees include freight and the self-driving car unit, Advanced Technologies Group. Business Insider learned that the leader of the Freight unit, Lior Ron, did warn employees that there would be layoffs last week.
The CEO of the self-driving car unit, Eric Meyhofer, also did not answer any questions about layoffs at the all-hands meeting last week. But, the atmosphere at the all-hands was not all gloom and doom. Employees submit questions for the all-hands meetings in advance and vote on them. And one question that received many votes was asking senior leadership to name their "guilty pleasure" songs. So, at the all-hands meeting, Meyhofer enjoyed a discussion on that. Some people found a discussion about songs while people are worried about their jobs to be "tone deaf," as one person told us, others enjoyed it.
Uber laid off 3,700 people about two weeks ago, on top of the cuts made when it shuttered certain international Uber Eats organizations, transferring others to its Middle East subsidiary Careem and laying off a third of Careem's employees. It also had multiple rounds of layoffs in 2019, cutting about 1,100 people. Should this next round of layoffs be as large as the one earlier this month, at around 4,000, Uber will have cut about 10,000 jobs from its payroll over the past year.
Are you an Uber insider with insight to share? Contact Julie Bort via email at jbort@bjinnox.com or on encrypted chat app Signal at (970) 430-6112 (no PR inquiries, please). Open DMs on Twitter @Julie188.
Now read:
- A former WeWork executive says the company is gearing up for another layoff, as it continues to shift to a real estate mindset
- Uber CEO tells employees that it is finalizing layoffs as fears circulate among staff that 4,000 jobs will be cut
- Amazon's cloud CEO wants the world to know that Zoom mostly runs on AWS, not Oracle's cloud
- Uber is now lacking a COO, CTO, and CPO, among other high profile executive exits
