Rivian left thousands of its workers in limbo after announcing it was laying off 10% of its salaried staff on Wednesday.
Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe told staff they’d have to wait to find out whether their role had been impacted until Thursday morning, after notifying staff of the cuts on Wednesday, according to a copy of the email obtained by Business Insider.
Scaringe said staff would be notified between 7:30 and 8 a.m. Pacific Time on Thursday. But news of the layoffs broke on Wednesday afternoon.
“We know the timing here is difficult — waiting between now and tomorrow to understand whether you’re impacted is far from ideal, but we want to ensure a considerate notification process that accommodates all time zones,” the email reads.
In an email to BI, Rivian did not specify exactly how many salaried staff members would be cut, but said that it has 16,700 total employees, including both salaried and hourly workers.
A company spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment on the timeline of the layoff notices.
“Our business is facing a challenging macroeconomic environment—including historically high interest rates and geopolitical uncertainty—and we need to make purposeful changes now to ensure our promising future,” Scaringe told staff via email. “We’ve recently implemented several organizational and leadership changes, but we need to do more to achieve our strategic priorities,” the email continued.
Rivian is joining a growing list of tech companies to lay off staff this year.
The carmaker’s strategy of letting workers stew an entire night before letting them know which roles have been eliminated appears to be an unusual one. Over the past year, tech companies have alerted workers to a change in their role through all manner of measures, from Google workers who learned they’d been terminated after they were unable to badge into the office to Twitter staff members who reportedly learned they’d lost their jobs when they were abruptly cut off from company systems.
More commonly, workers receive a notification to chat with human resources or a manager simultaneously or shortly after a companywide email.
It’s the carmaker’s third layoff over the past two years. The company is one of many in the EV industry to make cuts amid slowing demand. Both Ford and General Motors have already begun to scale back their EV plans. High interest rates, slowing demand, and pressure from Tesla’s pricing strategy have put pressure on the US electric car market.
“Our business is not immune to existing economic and geopolitical uncertainties,” Scaringe said on Wednesday during the company’s earnings call. “Most notably the impact of historically high interest rates which has negatively impacted demand.”
