Wednesday, December 07, 2022

Tech firms plan more Bay Area job cuts: Juul Labs, Astra Space, Intel

Bay Area tech job cuts top 7,900 as layoffs widen

People take photos in front of the Meta sign as an employee-shuttle bus drives into the Meta/Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. on October 20, 2022. Teamsters union members held a protest outside Meta/Facebook headquarters over plans to lay off up to a third of Meta’s Bay Area employee-shuttle bus drivers. Meta said the layoffs are because fewer employees are going to the office in Menlo Park and instead working remote.
 (Douglas Zimmerman/Special to the Bay Area News Group)

By GEORGE AVALOS | gavalos@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group

PUBLISHED: December 6, 2022 

Tech companies are eyeing layoffs that will eliminate the jobs of hundreds of Bay Area workers, a new round of terminations poised to jolt the region’s employment sector.

All told, tech companies have decided to chop 270 more Bay Area jobs, according to official notices that the firms sent to the state labor agency.

The tech and biotech job cuts in the Bay Area: an estimated 7,959 in October, November and December, according to this news organization’s review of numerous WARN letters to the state Employment Development Department.

The waves of cost-cutting could stagger the region’s increasingly woozy economy.


Even worse, other tech titans such as San Jose-based Cisco and Palo Alto-based Hewlett Packard have warned that they are considering the elimination of several thousand jobs worldwide.

This is how the current crop of layoffs breaks down, according to this news organization’s review of several WARN notices filed by the tech companies with the state EDD:Juul Labs is cutting 116 positions in San Francisco.
Intel has revealed plans to cut 90 jobs in Santa Clara.
Astra Space is chopping 64 jobs, primarily in Alameda, although one job is being cut in Mountain View.

Since Oct. 1, and including the most recent WARN notices on file with the EDD, tech and biotech companies have revealed plans to eliminate more than 7,900 jobs in the Bay Area.

Three tech or biotech companies have revealed plans to eliminate at least 1,000 jobs in the Bay Area, this news organization’s review of the WARN notices to the EDD shows.

Facebook app owner Meta Platforms has decided to cut 2,564 jobs, affecting workers in Menlo Park, Burlingame, Fremont, Sunnyvale and San Francisco.

Twitter is eliminating 1,126 positions, affecting employees in San Francisco and San Jose.

Cepheid is cutting 1,003 jobs, primarily in Newark, although positions are being lost in Sunnyvale and Santa Clara.

Intel has disclosed plans to cut hundreds of Northern California jobs. Besides the 90 jobs in Santa Clara, the chipmaker is planning to eliminate another 111 in Folsom.

Juul reported that its layoffs are slated to begin on or around Jan. 17, 2023, and could continue through April 7 of next year, the company’s WARN notice stated.

The companies all stated that they expected the job cuts to be permanent.

Among other high-profile tech companies that have revealed plans to reduce their staffing: Amazon is cutting 263 jobs in Sunnyvale, Lyft is eliminating 227 positions in San Francisco, Oracle is cutting 200 jobs in Redwood City and Belmont, Roku is laying off 93 workers in San Jose and PayPal is cutting 59 positions in San Jose, the WARN notices show.

Alameda-based Astra Space stated that its layoffs occurred on Nov. 9. The company makes launch vehicles for commercial and military customers that week to deliver payloads into space.

At least two of Astra Space’s launch vehicles have successfully reached orbit. Several launch vehicles, however, have experienced an array of failures.

“While we remain committed to building our company, we cannot continue our business operations at its current levels,” Carla Supanich, Astra Space’s chief people officer, wrote in the company’s WARN notice to the state EDD.

Astra Space indicated in the WARN notice that the cutbacks were necessary to help keep the company’s finances on a stable trajectory.

During 2019, 2020 and 2021, Astra Space generated no revenue, according to the Yahoo Finance site. Over the one-year period that ended in September, Astra Space generated $9.4 million in revenue and lost $418.4 million.

“To ensure we have the financial runway to deliver for our customers and on our mission to Improve ‘Life on Earth From Space,’ we need to refocus our business operations,” Supanich wrote in the WARN letter.

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