Two layoff announcements this week, shaped by very different labor systems
Within about 24 hours this week, two very different companies told their people that thousands of jobs are going away.
On Monday, July 27, Porsche AG and its general works council announced an agreement to cut 5,000 more positions at two of its sites by 2035, which brings the total to around 9,000, or about one in five of its employees. On Tuesday, July 28, Visa employees got a memo from CEO Ryan McInerney: about 2,600 people impacted, 7 percent of the company, mostly from product and technology teams. That memo was sent on the same day Visa was scheduled to report quarterly results after the close.
As reported by Bloomberg and confirmed by the company, McInerney claims in his memo that he has "deep conviction that we are doing what is right for Visa," and the rest of the note is all about driving efficiency, reinvesting, and highest-potential opportunities. He added that AI is reshaping how work gets done at the company. The email was addressed to employees, but clearly its copy would feel right at home on an analyst call (maybe because management happened to have one scheduled a few hours later).
Porsche AG announcement, which the company calls its "Future Package," is a different kind of layoff communication. Nobody gets forced out, the reductions run through retirements, voluntary exits and unrenewed contracts, stretched across nine years, with a commitment in writing that there would be no forced layoffs at the two home sites through 2035. Workers defer 3.5 percent of their pay raises until 2035, so postponed rather than erased, but lets be honest a raise you wait nine years for is still money out of your pocket today and see the Christmas bonus drop from up to a full month's salary to 60 percent of one. In return they get a €1,500 payment in August (€1,911 for union members), that no-forced-layoffs guarantee in writing, and €2.1 billion invested in a plant and research center while senior managers give up matching raises outright in 2027 and 2028. The announcement even uses two distinct voices: CEO Michael Leiters declaring the package good for the company, and works council chairman Ibrahim Aslan saying, "The package was hard-fought. Now we have to implement it together with the Executive Board."
Now the big giant comms caveat.
German law forced Porsche to the table; companies there can't cut jobs at this scale without negotiating with elected worker representatives so the comms reads better partly because the deal is better, and the deal is better partly because workers had the leverage to demand it. Visa's people had no such seat. So the fair comparison here is between two deals, not two comms teams. If the announcement has nothing to offer the people affected beyond a severance link, that problem was settled long before anyone opened a blank document.
Worth separating from the ceiling point: even with nothing to offer, the prose didn't have to lean this hard on transformation-speak. Later in the same memo, McInerney talks about needing to keep evolving how the company works, with AI accelerating that evolution — generic enough to fit any reorganization anywhere. None of that was required by the deal; it's a choice about words, and words are the one thing comms controls regardless of how thin the deal is.
If you're being asked to write restructuring comms or a layoff announcement, a test you can run on the draft is to read it and ask leadership "who is this for?" If the room hesitates, the comms may not be the problem. Comms can make a hard message clear, honest, even humane but it can't manufacture a no-layoffs guarantee or an investment commitment that was never on the table, and most comms leaders never get a seat at the table where those decisions are made. The craft has a ceiling, and it's set by the decision, not the writer. Knowing where that ceiling sits is the difference between spending a week polishing language that was never going to fix the problem, and telling leadership plainly, before anything goes out, exactly how thin this is going to read to the people who lose their jobs.
Paramount's CEO answered (some) merger limbo questions for employees
On Friday, July 24, Paramount told the world its $111 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery is on hold; under a court-approved agreement, the deal can't close until June 1, 2027, or five days after a judge rules on the lawsuits trying to stop it, whichever comes first. A dozen state attorneys general and the Writers Guild are suing to block it.
On Monday, CEO David Ellison sent all staff a memo about it, and the memo actually, surprisingly, explained the situation. The full text, published by Deadline Hollywood , walks employees through the litigation the way a general counsel would brief a board, things like which regulators have cleared the deal (65 jurisdictions, by the memo's count), who's suing, and the decision to skip the August 3 injunction hearing and go straight to a full trial, with proposed schedules due to the court by Friday.
The usual version of this is either a) don't say anything to employees at all and hope they don't read news or b) three sentences of reassurance and a thank-you. Instead, Ellison briefed his employees fully using specifics: names of the plaintiffs, the reasoning for skipping the hearing, where integration planning stands, and a commitment that "when there is meaningful, confirmed information to share, you will hear it from us." This way assumes employees handle detail better than they handle soothing which is something most communicators believe in theory but few companies practice mid-litigation, because legal teams usually argue for saying less/nothing.
Two things to keep in mind.
The memo is selective, and one particular omission shows just how. The week before, the federal judge on the case froze the deal with a temporary restraining order and wrote that the states had presented compelling evidence the merger may violate antitrust law. That finding, a judge deciding the other side's case was strong enough to stop a $111 billion deal in its tracks, appears nowhere in this comms. Every fact in it favors Paramount's position, and the 65-jurisdictions figure is the company's own count, not a court's.
Also, Ellison's employees aren't reading in a vacuum: the same week, SAG-AFTRA's board voted to oppose the merger and three well-known actors published a Guardian op-ed urging the UK to block it. So a detailed memo buys credibility only as long as the details keep matching what employees see in the trades the next morning.
That commitment from Ellison to continue updating the organization when there is new confirmed information is the right instinct (and standard copy in my experience when addressing rumors). The alternative is employees filling the gap themselves with rumors or leaked filings, and whatever the trades print first, and Ellison is right to want to be the one who tells his own people the news. The harder part is the structure behind it because a trial with no fixed date can run months with nothing new to confirm, and if updates only arrive when something big happens, the quiet in between could start to read as bad news on its own.
BuzzFeed's layoff memo praises the owner while laying people off
BuzzFeed is cutting about 180 jobs across BuzzFeed, HuffPost and Tasty, more than a third of a company that had about 510 people, in the first major restructuring since Byron Allen took a majority stake and the CEO chair in May. The comms announcing it, obtained by The Hollywood Reporter, came from "leadership".
What the memo does have is a tribute. After opening with changes it says are required to put the business on a path to profitable, sustainable growth, it revisits March, when the company told investors it had substantial doubt about surviving, and then credits Allen by name with quickly stepping in with an investment of approximately $26 million to stabilize and grow the company. Later it adds that "Byron sees incredible opportunity in all of our assets." The numbers don't match anything in the company's public deal filings, which describe $20 million in cash at closing plus a $100 million promissory note. Maybe the $26 million refers to something separate; the memo doesn't say. Either way, more than a third of the staff is reading words that thank the man at the top, by name and dollar amount, in the same breath it eliminates their jobs.
Whatever the intent, the effect of those two choices runs in one direction: it shields the people who wrote it and flatters the person who owns it, while the actual news lands on everybody else. An unsigned memo means no leader stands behind the hardest message a company sends; owner-praise mid-layoff means the person losing their job was never the reader the prose was tuned for. BuzzFeed reports earnings August 4, so the employees who remain will get to compare Monday's language against next week's numbers.
Keep this one in your files for the next time a draft comes back from review with the signature line deleted. The signature carries the accountability: every paragraph above it gets measured against the name below it, and a blank where the name should be tells employees more than anything you write. Ask whether it would read differently with a name required at the bottom because your employees will answer that question whether you ask it or not.