“I’m angry about it,” the employee told MPA the day after his firing on Thursday. “I still am. It was terrible. They’ve not been very good about corporate communications since I started,” he added, noting that the company quietly conducted two previous rounds of layoffs – albeit involving fewer employees – in the last couple of months, including one mass firing in June. “They started laying off people a couple of months ago, and a couple of people from my team were laid off last month who had been around longer than me.”
Yet the firings this week came as a surprise given assurances made by company executives after last month’s round of layoffs, he noted: “They told everyone else there that there were no plans for future layoffs,” he said. Top brass spoke to remaining workers detailing the volatile state of the industry “…but they were saying they were in a good position to withstand future shocks and didn’t expect more layoffs in the near future,” the former employee said. “That was a month ago. I feel if they had been more transparent with us and told us there’s actually a significant possibility that more people could lose their jobs or the company might be in trouble, that would’ve been more transparent – let us know so we could search for something else or stay if we were comfortable with the risk. But they didn’t do that.”
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Instead, according to the former employee, the company took a decidedly different tack: “Instead, yesterday morning they just decided to announce a ‘company update’ – that was the name of the meeting. So we show up – it didn’t even go live at the right time, it was kind of a mess, and they said we’re actually going to do it at 1:30pm. Pallante comes on and he says ‘yeah, Sprout is closing its doors and everyone’s terminated effective immediately.’ There were only 300 people on the call but there were over 600 employees there and they said everyone was terminated effective immediately. And then they just left the phone call! They didn’t take any questions. So everyone is left on the chat asking ‘what’s going on?’ Everyone’s confused asking ‘are we getting paid tomorrow?’ Payday is literally today, and they dumped us yesterday. I looked at my bank account this morning, no pay.
“This is insane. So they basically just used us for over two weeks and told us nothing was going to happen and then they’re not going to pay us. It’s probably illegal, definitely unethical, and a terrible situation for all the employees.”
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