Amazon cuts Slough jobs

Online retailer Amazon.com is to move 90 Slough-based jobs to Ireland as the company seeks to recruit 450 multilingual customer-service staff.

The company said it wants more French and German speakers but that a squeeze on resources in Slough meant it couldn't find enough linguists.

An Amazon.com spokesman told silicon.com the company is planning to close its Slough call centre.

He said: "We've announced a new call centre in Cork and are creating 450 jobs there. At the same time we are proposing to close the customer call centre in Slough. We are now consulting [staff] there.

"We're hoping that all our customer call centre staff will relocate. We're going to open in Ireland regardless of Slough for the future growth of the European business. Ireland has an excellent reputation for second and third languages."

Amazon said it had been struggling to find enough staff around the Christmas period to deal with the number of calls it was receiving.

The new operation will deal with internet and telephone enquiries.