A Massive Company Now Announces Layoffs in California

May 20, 2024

A massive company now announces layoffs in California affecting approximately 600 employees in the gold state, according to a filing.

Electric vehicle giant Tesla has cut approximately 600 more jobs across its manufacturing plants and engineering offices in California.

Two major facilities in Fremont and Palo Alto were heavily impacted by the Tesla layoffs.

In Fremont, home to the company’s first U.S. automotive plant, 378 jobs were eliminated including factory workers involved in vehicle assembly as well as environmental health and safety directors.

At Tesla’s battery development center on Kato Road in Fremont, a total of 65 positions were cut.

Among those impacted were roles related to staffing and running the production lines.

In the company’s Palo Alto engineering headquarters, 233 more employees lost their jobs, with cuts spanning from entry-level software developers and robotics engineers up to two directors of technical programs.

The reductions decimated Tesla’s teams working on customer and employee apps and software, according to former employees, with most of those designers and developers being laid off.

The hundreds of new California terminations were disclosed this week in a required WARN notice filed with the California Employment Development Department.

They come after CEO Elon Musk warned employees in an April memo that over 10% of Tesla’s global workforce would be slashed, though an exact number was not provided then.

Tesla did not respond to a request for comment on the latest cuts or total headcount reduction.

The automaker has undertaken multiple rounds of job cuts over the past year amid cost-cutting efforts.

The company’s downsizing has sparked questions about its ability to ramp up production and deliveries of new vehicle models like the Cybertruck amid an uncertain economic climate.

Musk has cited a “super bad feeling” about the economy as justification for trimming Tesla’s bloated workforce.

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Applications for unemployment benefits now surge to new highs, a sign that the white-hot labor market is starting to cool off.

First-time applications for unemployment benefits rose last week to 231,000, the highest level since August, per CNN.

Thursday’s data also showed that the number of continuing claims, or applications from people who have filed for unemployment for at least one week, was 1.78 million.

That’s an increase of 17,000 from the prior week, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The latest numbers come less than a week after the monthly jobs report showed the US economy added just 175,000 positions in April, less than economists expected and a steep drop-off from prior months.

US employers have now added an average of 245,500 jobs per month, versus 2023’s 251,000-per-month average.

Still, hiring remains strong. Although the unemployment rate ticked up to 3.9% last month, it’s the 27th consecutive month that the jobless rate has held under 4%, matching a streak last seen in the late 1960s.

Weekly jobless claims data tends to be volatile but, while one week’s worth of data “does not a trend make,” said Chris Rupkey, chief economist at Fwdbonds.

“We can no longer be sure that calm seas lie ahead for the US economy if today’s weekly jobless claims are any indication.”

“Company layoffs are picking up, hinting at caution on the part of companies as they weigh the outlook for the second half of the year,” he wrote in a note Thursday.

The Federal Reserve has been battling inflation by raising its key lending rate in the hopes of slowing the economy.

While the labor market has so far resisted those efforts, remaining white hot for the past 18 months despite 11 rate hikes from the central bank, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said last week that demand has “cooled from its extremely high level of a couple of years ago.”

Ian Shepherdson at Pantheon Economics said in a note Thursday: “We’d need to see at least a month of elevated readings to convince us that the trend really has turned.”

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Also Read: A Giant Company Now Announces Unexpected Layoffs in Virginia

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