Domestika plans to lay off 89 workers in Spain. The company, which was born in Madrid in the early 2000s and later moved its headquarters to Silicon Valley, is negotiating an ERO with the workers of the subsidiary Dmstk SL, based in Madrid. “The cut affects 45% of the workforce, which consists of 198 people in Spain”, assure this newspaper sources of the representatives of the workers of the company, which specializes in online training courses.
The reasons put forward by the company – unsuccessfully contacted by this newspaper – are economic, organizational and production. “The current macroeconomic context is causing cuts in the entire technology sector, but we are also directly harmed by the automation of processes of new artificial intelligence applications, such as ChatGPT”, lamented workers, advised by the law firm Collective Ronda.
Of the 89 employees affected, 22 are linked to translation services, a task that will from now on be automated by machine translation applications. In addition, nine workers specializing in the creation of marketing content will lose their jobs because their activity will be automated by ChatGPT.
“Two people will remain in the marketing team who will supervise the texts generated by the robot”, say these sources, who are negotiating the terms of their departure. With 15 days to go until the end of the talks, the company offers compensation of 25 days per year worked and has considered relocating three workers to another company in the group: Estudios de Grabación Digital, whose activity is carried out face-to-face in Madrid
The same sources assure that this subsidiary, which operates as a content producer, will not be affected by the cuts. Last year Domestika already carried out a hundred redundancies in the two subsidiaries. “The workers consider that the cuts were a covert ERO. A third of those affected decided to sue the company and managed to increase the compensation up to 90 days per year worked”, he comments.
That same year, Domestika secured 100 million dollars, about 92 million euros, in an investment round that allowed the company to become a unicorn because it exceeded the 1,000 million valuation. The company led by Julio G. Cotorruelo and Tomy Pelluz has a turnover of around 60 million dollars, around 55 million euros.