Cyren cuts up to 30 Ukrainian professionals with no pay for 40 days

On February 1, the tech company Cyren announced that it was laying off a significant number of employees and was considering the scenario of complete liquidation. According to DOU, the company did not give the Ukrainian team advance notice of the dismissal and failed to pay for the 40 days worked.

Cyren’s history of downsizing

• Founded in Israel in 1991 and headquartered in McLean, Virginia, Cyren specializes in cybersecurity. Cyren employed more than 200 professionals.
• However, on February 1, in an official press release, Cyren explained that it had to cut 121 employees due “to current market conditions and associated challenges with raising additional capital.”
• In a February 1 report, the company said the costs associated with the layoff process and severance payments to professionals would total an estimated $3.6 million.

The situation with Ukrainian Specialists

DOU spoke with five former employees of the Ukrainian Cyren team. All of them claim that there was no advance warning of the layoff. They were informed of their dismissal on February 1, and their contracts were terminated on the same day.

“According to the terms of the contract, the company must give a 30-day notice of layoff. If it does not, it is obliged to pay one more month’s pay. But Cyren didn’t even pay people their January salaries. I know that workers in Iceland and the Philippines were fired and not paid all the money either. But the employees in Israel got their salaries,” says Ksenia Belianskaya, who has worked at Cyren for more than five years.

Other employees say there have been wage delays before, so the total debt after the layoff is even more than one month.

“Before that, our department had experienced salary delays, so we started to think that things were going to go badly. And so it happened,” he says. “We were not paid for 40 full days of work. All emails to the company or its representatives were ignored. It’s a shame that during the war, when people were literally under fire in February and March, they tried to provide services 24/7, from shelters or corridors. Some of my colleagues moved to the west of the country and couldn’t pay the rent because of what they did to us,” said Daniel Chag, who has been working at Cyren since 2019 as an Incident Manager.

Daniel suggests that the company took advantage of the situation of Ukrainians:

“We have very limited means to get justice. Most of the contracts stipulate that any disputes are resolved in an Israeli court, where none of us can file a lawsuit right now.”