Staff Reports
Netflix’s new corporate “culture memo” included plenty of advise for the company’s employees. The extreme level of wokeness among the workforce was mentioned in one section of the document. They cautioned employees that the service distributes a wide range of content, not all of which would appeal to people with overly progressive tastes. The firm stated that if any of the employees were too easily offended to tolerate such material, Netflix wasn’t the place for them.
However, it appears that not enough people accepted their invitation to pack their belongings. The company stated yesterday that it would be ending employment for approximately 150 employees, mostly in the United States. However, the wokeness issue was not mentioned in this announcement. The layoffs are motivated by the fact that Netflix isn’t bringing in as much money as they had planned.
Netflix is letting off about 150 staff, just weeks after reporting its first membership decrease since 2011.
An internal memo acquired by The Hollywood Reporter, which broke the story, detailed the employment layoffs.
“As we discussed on results, our slowing revenue growth implies we are also needing to restrict our expense growth as a company,” a Netflix representative said on Tuesday. So we’re letting roughly 150 staff go today, largely in the United States.”
We recently learned that Netflix had a net loss in overall members, rather than the “slower growth” they had predicted. Some of this is undoubtedly due to the overwhelming quantity of new competitors entering the field. Though our family still has Netflix, I’ve already canceled a handful of subscriptions that I rarely use (for now). There’s also probably some market saturation at work here. Netflix has been in existence for quite some time. How many people who would benefit from such a service haven’t received it yet?
Whatever the reason, they need to cut costs somewhere, and layoffs were always going to be a part of the plan. They’re also considering prohibiting households from exchanging passwords. That could be the final straw for me, especially since they recently hiked their pricing again. Alternatively, instead of checking in at the same moment, we may both use my password and account. I’ll have to wait for more information.
But none of this rules out the possibility that the full wokeness issue was at play. Some clients may have left because they discovered more appealing alternatives. If the wokeness level had been toned back a touch, some of their more conservative clients might have stayed and not sought other pastures. The whole “Cuties” disaster, as John just pointed out, no doubt turned off a number of families.
Netflix should presumably move rapidly in whatever direction they choose. According to the company’s most recent report, it expects to lose another two million subscribed members in the second quarter. If that’s the case, these aren’t the last layoffs we’ll hear about.
