Labor

The previously-rumored cuts follow an accidental calendar invite sent last night. They come after 14,000 corporate jobs were cut in October, attributed partially to advances in AI. This latest round of layoffs is less than 5 percent of Amazon’s 350,000 corporate workforce.

A survey of 5,000 white collar workers suggests experiences differ greatly between CEOs and non-management employees. Forty percent of workers say it saves them no time each week to use AI and just two percent say it saves them more than 12 hours. Meanwhile, two percent of executives say they don’t save any time, and 19 percent say it saves them more than 12 hours a week.

The GTA VI studio now claims that firing dozens of employees last week for “gross misconduct” was because they were “found to be distributing and discussing confidential information in a public forum.”

Sources tell Reuters and Bloomberg that the job cuts could start on Tuesday, potentially impacting almost 10 percent of Amazon’s 350,000 corporate employees across logistics, gaming, payments, and cloud computing teams.

Unionized employees are striking for a codified four-day work week and more money for the lowest paid employees, Kickstarter United announced. Importantly, the union isn’t asking for a boycott of the crowdfunding platform — instead, they’re asking creators to complain about issues they run into, use the union logo in projects, and to send letters of support to management.

As Mark Gurman noted in a tweet, the lawsuit claims the management of an Apple Store in Reston, VA, “failed to accommodate an employee’s Jewish faith and subsequently fired him because of his religion and in retaliation for complaining of religion-based discrimination.”

Engadget and The Register note that Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman has announced layoffs affecting 30 percent of its workforce, after telling employees in May that “...AI is coming for your jobs. Heck, it’s coming for my job too.”

The story and franchise development team at Activision Blizzard will join the Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 9510. This is the second union coming out of Blizzard this year after the Overwatch team voted for unionization in May. The department focuses on creating cinematics, animation, and narrative content, as well as being the place that houses franchise historians.

Workers at Raven Software have finally secured their first union contract winning for its members guaranteed wage increases, protection against mandatory overtime known as crunch, and more. The win comes three years after quality assurance workers at the Call of Duty support studio organized the Game Workers Alliance in collaboration with the Communications Workers of America.

SAG-AFTRA members voted to conclude the year-long strike and approve a new media agreement after three years of total bargaining. The new contract establishes AI guardrails to protect performers from having their likeness used without consent, alongside increases to salary requirements, overtime, and other provisions.

Jenna Shumway, a former manager at SpaceX, accuses the company of failing to pay her as much as her male counterparts for similar work, as reported by TechCrunch.

Sources tell Bloomberg that the job cuts could heavily impact workers in sales, while also spanning other areas of the company. My colleague Tom Warren reported earlier this month that there could soon be Xbox-related layoffs as well.

In a memo seen by The Oregonian, Intel manufacturing Vice President Naga Chandrasekara tells workers that the company could cut between 15 and 20 percent of workers in its Foundry division. “These are difficult actions but essential to meet our affordability challenges and current financial position of the company,” Chandrasekara writes, according to The Oregonian.

As of 3 PM PT today, SAG-AFTRA will officially suspend the strike against the signatory companies of the interactive media agreement. With this suspension, the nearly year-long voice performer strike against video game companies including Take-Two Interactive, Activision Publishing and more will be tentatively over.

The layoffs on Tuesday impact around 3.5 percent of Paramount’s global workforce, with the company having laid off around 2,000 US employees last year. In an internal memo seen by Deadline, Paramount execs said the cuts were driven by linear TV declines and broader economic concerns as the company focuses its efforts on streaming.

A notification on Washington’s statewide Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) layoff and closure database says the exact number is 305. According to a statement from Microsoft to GeekWire, that number is in addition to the 6,000 layoffs it announced last month,

Deadline reports on another round of mass layoffs at Disney, affecting hundreds of people. “...across divisions of Disney Entertainment, including marketing for both film and television as well as television publicity, casting and development,” as well as corporate financing.

Amazon engineers related their experience creating software to The New York Times:

Unionized workers at Politico allege the company violated its contract by using AI-generated content in a live blog — and are escalating their complaint to arbitration this summer. The union says the AI-generated summaries contained factual errors and language that’s off-limits for writers. The result of arbitration could set an important precedent for an industry that’s seen countless AI disputes in recent years.

Last week, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby partially blamed a “walkout” by air traffic controllers, along with equipment failures and understaffing, for massive delays and the cancellation of 35 daily round-trip flights.

Niantic Spatial announced the job cuts after it sold its gaming business to the Saudi Arabia-owned developer Scopely last month. But now we know how many employees may be affected, as a California WARN notice filed in March (but spotted now by Game Developer) indicates that Niantic will lay off 68 employees in the state on May 20th, 2025.