With revenue hit due to the Covid-induced lockdown, ride hailing app Uber has announced its decision to lay off 600 or about 25 per cent of its 2,400 employees in India. The company has decided to sack employees across verticals including customer & driver support, business development, legal, finance, policy and marketing. A part of the company’s global technology centre teams has also been impacted, but these were primarily employees in roles catering to the international market which are redundant, various media reported citing sources.
The retrenched employees would be paid 10 to 12 weeks of salary, besides medical insurance coverage for the next six months and outplacement support, the company said. These staffers would also be allowed to retain their laptops and given the option of joining the Uber talent directory.
The official word from Uber comes only a week after its India rival Ola announced that it would be laying off 1,400 staff from rides, financial services and food business as revenues declined by 95 per cent in the last two months due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The Uber lay offs are part of the company's global job cut plan, done across geographies. Uber Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi has announced a global restructuring plan at the company, which saw its worldwide revenue declining 80 per cent year-on-year in April.
In his back-to-back announcements this month, the CEO of the embattled vehicle aggregator said the company would retrench over 6,700 employees, or 25 per cent of its 27,000-strong workforce, across the globe, in a bid to save $1 billion. India accounts for around eight per cent of its total global employee strength.
