The collapse of San Fran is going strong.
“According to a series of letters sent to state and local officials in recent days, San Francisco’s Temple Nightclub is closing its doors; oil giant Shell is closing the operations of Volta, a San Francisco-based electric-vehicle charging startup it acquired last year; pharmaceutical company Sanofi is shuttering the South San Francisco-based Amunix unit it acquired two years ago; and Alameda-based mental-health-care provider Telecare is closing its facility in Redwood City.”
With the close of the Golden Gate bridge yesterday, you will see more firms leaving San Fran—if employees and clients can not come into the City, then it is time to leave. Newsom and Mayor Breed allowed Nazi’s to close the Bridge. The good news is that soon all that will be left in San Fran will be the homeless, the illegal aliens and corrupt government officials.
Genentech to cut 436 in latest SF area layoffs
Troy Wolverton, SF Examiner, 4/12/24 https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/technology/genentech-cutting-436-in-latest-sf-area-layoffs/article_2fc72ada-f929-11ee-954e-d7e1f3f19150.html
Genentech and four other companies in San Francisco and the north Peninsula are together laying off 790 workers and four of them are shutting down at least some of their operations.
According to a series of letters sent to state and local officials in recent days, San Francisco’s Temple Nightclub is closing its doors; oil giant Shell is closing the operations of Volta, a San Francisco-based electric-vehicle charging startup it acquired last year; pharmaceutical company Sanofi is shuttering the South San Francisco-based Amunix unit it acquired two years ago; and Alameda-based mental-health-care provider Telecare is closing its facility in Redwood City.
Although Genentech isn’t closing any facilities, its round of layoffs is by far the largest. The South San Francisco-based biotechnology company is letting go 436 people, according to a letter it sent to state and local officials last week. That amounts to about 3% of its global staff and includes employees that don’t work in its headquarters at 1 DNA Way, said Nadine Pinell, a company spokeswoman. Pinell declined to say how many of those affected by the cuts are based in South San Francisco.
Genentech is making the cuts to refocus its efforts on the most promising treatments it has in development, it said in a statement. Despite the cuts, Genentech is continuing to hire in other areas, and Roche, its Swiss-based parent company, expects its overall workforce to “remain stable” this year, according to the statement.
“This limited reduction will allow us to shift resources to the areas that we believe can provide the greatest impact for patients,” Genentech said in its statement.
Susan Stewart, an assistant general counsel in Genentech’s employment-law group, said in a letter to state and local officials on April 3 that the company expects to make the cuts on four different days: June 5, June 24, July 22 and Aug. 7. Among those the company plans to let go are two vice presidents, 22 principal scientists, and 18 therapeutic area managers.
Also in South San Francisco, Sanofi is cutting 100 employees as part of its closure of its Amunix unit, which was developing immunotherapy treatments for cancer. The Paris-based company paid $1.2 billion for Amunix, according to a statement it issued at the time it announced the deal.
Similar to Genentech, Sanofi decided to close Amunix to refocus its efforts — in its case, on other immunotherapy treatments with “high potential,” the company said in a statement. Sanofi is in talks to sell Amunix’s assets, including its research and manufacturing gear, it said in the statement.
“We have made progress and are in active discussions with potential partners,” the company said. “We expect to make final determinations in the next few months.”
Also on the Peninsula, Telecare plans to lay off 100 workers as part of San Mateo County’s effort to replace its aging Cordilleras psychiatric center with a new campus. Currently, the company operates a 68-bed mental-health recovery center and a 49-bed residential facility at 200 Edmonds Road in Redwood City.
The county is replacing that decades-old facility with four 16-bed recovery centers and a separate 57-bed housing facility for people with histories of mental illnesses. On the new campus, Telecare will only operate the housing facility and one of the recovery centers, company spokeswoman Daphne Phillips said.
“Essentially, this is an upgrade” of the facilities, she said. “This has been in progress for years.”
Some of the affected workers will likely find jobs at the new facility Telecare will operate, Phillips said. The company plans to close and move patients out of the current facility over a period of time as the new buildings open, she said. It plans to begin laying off staff over a 14-day period beginning June 3, said Bri Lopez, an employee-relations specialist at Telecare, in a letter to state and local officials April 3.
Among those affected by the cuts are 25 recovery specialists, nine registered nurse supervisors and nine staff nurses, according to Lopez’s letter.
Some 70 of the 100 workers at the current facility — including housekeepers, cooks, recovery specialists and licensed vocational nurses — are represented by AFSCME District Council 57 Local 829, according to Ryan Shannon, a union representative. The new Telecare-run facilities will only employ 32 people in total, including just 18 full-time, he said.
The company plans to outsource housekeeping operations at the new facility instead of employing unionized housekeepers, and the county intends to outsource food preparation instead of using unionized cooks, Shannon said.
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The facility is aging and needs to be replaced. By dividing the mental-health centers into four smaller units, the county will be eligible for more federal funding, Shannon said.
“We understand the reasons” for replacing the current facility, he said. “But after the dust settles, there will be a lot of employees that lose their jobs.”
Meanwhile, Shell is laying off 68 Volta workers across the country — including 13 in San Francisco — as it closes the company’s operations. The British corporation acquired Volta last year for $169 million in cash.
The deal came less than two years after Volta went public in a special-purpose acquisition company deal that initially valued the charging company at $2 billion. But after going public, Volta saw its stock price plunge.
Shell plans to close Volta’s operations and lay off its staff May 31, Volta CEO Brandt Hastings said in a March 29 letter to state and local officials.
The move is part of an effort by Shell to streamline its own business, company spokesman Curtis Smith said in an email. Shell intends to incorporate Volta into its own operations and expects to offer jobs to a “majority” of affected Volta workers, Smith said. As such, the layoff notice was a “precautionary measure,” he said.
Volta’s electric-vehicle chargers “remain a valuable part of our portfolio,” Smith said.
However, he did not say whether Shell intended to continue operating them or whether the company planned to follow through on Volta’s planned expansion of its charging network.
Among those Shell intends to cut in San Francisco are Volta’s executive vice president and “head of people,” its vice president overseeing the growth and operations of its charging business and a senior manager of quality assurance engineering, Hastings said in his letter. The company’s headquarters was at 155 De Haro St. in The City.
As part of its own closure, slated for May 25, Temple Nightclub plans to lay off 86 people. Located at 540 Howard St., the venue was reportedly popular with The City’s tech workers.
In a letter to staff that was shared with state and local officials on April 3, the nightclub blamed its closure and layoffs on “financial difficulties due to economic changes within our industry.” Although it tried to adapt, it wasn’t able to boost its bottom line, the venue said in the letter.
“Due to this climate, we have come to the decision to cease Temple nightclub operations,” it said. It continued: “We will take some time to restructure our organization & business model moving forward.”
Among those losing their jobs are 27 security workers, 18 bartenders and 12 servers, according to the letter.
Temple representatives did not respond to a request for comment.
The layoffs by Temple and the other companies are only the latest in the San Francisco area. Earlier this week, Checkr, a San Francisco-based provider of employment verification services, announced plans to cut 260 workers in The City.
