A Texas Company Now Announces Unexpected Job Cuts

March 13, 2024

A Texas company now announces unexpected job cuts under its new leadership with Warner Bros Discovery, sources confirm.

Rooster Teeth, the Austin-born media company that pioneered crowdfunded movies, animations, and podcasts since its inception in 2003, is facing an abrupt shutdown, affecting over a hundred employees.

The move signals the end of an era for the digital production company that has been a cornerstone of Austin’s creative industry for over two decades.

It’s important to note that under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, an employer with more than 100 full-time workers must provide a 60-day notice before laying off 50 or more people at a single site.

These must be filed with the Texas Workforce Commission, and on Monday, Warner Bros. Discovery filed a Worker Adjustment & Retraining Notification (WARN) notice with the Texas Workforce Commission, revealing plans to lay off 133 employees who live and work in Austin or report remotely to the company’s Austin headquarters.

“This layoff will be permanent and the location will be permanently closed. Bumping rights (that is, the right to avoid termination by displacing another employee) do not exist,” the notice reads.

Employees at the 21-year-old digital production company learned of the shutdown and subsequent layoffs on Wednesday, March 6, in a morning meeting with Rooster Teeth General Manager Jordan Levin.

Levin also shared a memo on the shutdown that day in the company’s discord.

“Since inheriting ownership and control of Rooster Teeth from AT&T following its acquisition of TimeWarner, Warner Bros. Discovery continued its investment in our company, content and community,” the memo reads.

“Now however, it’s with a heavy heart I announce that Rooster Teeth is shutting down due to challenges facing digital media resulting from fundamental shifts in consumer behavior and monetization across platforms, advertising, and patronage.”

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A leading tech company is now cutting a whopping 8,000 jobs, part of a plan to increase its AI output, sources confirm.

IBM told employees on Tuesday in its marketing and communications division that it is slashing the size of its staff, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

Jonathan Adashek, IBM’s chief communications officer, made the announcement in a roughly seven-minute meeting with staffers in the unit, said the person, who asked not to be named because the news hasn’t been made public, reports CNBC.

In December, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told CNBC that the company was “massively upskilling all of our employees on AI,” after it announced a plan in August to replace nearly 8,000 jobs with AI.

IBM said on its earnings call in January of last year that it was cutting 3,900 positions.

“In 4Q earnings earlier this year, IBM disclosed a workforce rebalancing charge that would represent a very low single digit percentage of IBM’s global workforce, and we expect to exit 2024 at roughly the same level of employment as we entered with,” IBM told CNBC in a statement.

The latest cuts come alongside another round of downsizing in the tech industry.

So far this year, some 204 tech companies have cut almost 50,000 jobs, according to the website Layoffs.fyi.

January was the busiest month for tech layoffs since March, as Alphabet, Amazon and Unity all announced massive job cuts.

IBM has returned to growth in the past couple years, but expansion remains muted, says CNBC.

“Revenue in the fourth quarter increased 4% from a year earlier even as earnings topped estimates. CFO James Kavanaugh spoke of workforce rebalancing on the earnings call.”

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Also Read: Another Business Now Announces Unexpected Layoffs in Kentucky

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