As employees at Amazon.com Inc. wait to see if they have been impacted by the firm’s largest-ever round of layoffs, many more workers at companies in Ireland may yet need to prepare for bad news.
(Bloomberg) — As employees at Amazon.com Inc. wait to see if they have been impacted by the firm’s largest-ever round of layoffs, many more workers at companies in Ireland may yet need to prepare for bad news.
The government has already been notified of far more potential job losses than have been made public to date, documents seen by Bloomberg News show.
State employment agencies issued the Department of Enterprise with 41 separate early warning notices in the final months of 2022, according to records released under Ireland’s Freedom of Information Act. Yet details of just eight of these reports relating to five companies have become public knowledge so far.
The disclosed details relate to known cuts at multinational tech companies including Meta Platforms Inc., Twitter Inc., Stripe Inc. and Intel Corp. Pharmaceutical company Novartis AG’s plans to lay off 400 Irish workers have also been made public.
Under Ireland’s early warning system, the country’s enterprise agencies IDA Ireland and Enterprise Ireland flag significant issues with client companies that could impact their business in Ireland, and often warn of job cuts.
The department declined to disclose details of the remainder of the warnings because the information they contain has not yet been announced by the companies or uncovered through media reporting, it said.
Multinational Companies
The majority of the alerts are related to multinational companies, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the matter is sensitive. Some companies may feature in more than one of the 33 unreleased warning reports.
Early warning reports provides notice to the government of potential developments, which may include job cuts, company restructuring and site closures, a spokesperson for the Department of Enterprise said. The information is provided confidentially, not all EWRs translate to job losses, and on occasion the proposed number of job losses may be revised following statutory employee consultation periods.
Job losses in the multinational technology sector are expected to continue, with Amazon.com Inc. due to inform Irish employees impacted by recently announced global cuts Wednesday.
Microsoft Corp. is also expected to announce job cuts in a number of engineering divisions this week, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. The company employs about 3,500 workers in Ireland. The potential impact on those employees is not yet known.
A spokesperson for Microsoft in Ireland declined to comment when contacted by Bloomberg News.
Even so, the documents seen by Bloomberg relate to warnings received between Sept. 1 and Dec. 14, so would not have included any job losses at Amazon, which announced over 18,000 cuts globally earlier this month, or plans at Microsoft. Salesforce Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. are among other major Irish employers who’ve announced layoff plans since the start of the year. The companies have not yet confirmed the precise number of roles that are to be cut in Ireland.
Warnings issued in the first 11 months of 2022 were higher than in the corresponding period a year earlier, according to a briefing prepared for Enterprise Minister Simon Coveney published Tuesday.
Even so, while he acknowledged a “slowdown in job creation in the tech and digital area,” Coveney told reporters in Dublin he didn’t anticipate a “dramatic” number of job losses in the technology sector in Ireland.
“I think you’re seeing some corrections now and it remains to be seen how that impacts Ireland,” he said.
(Updates with details of Microsoft’s expected global job cuts from 10th paragraph)
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