Amazon is preparing a Massive workforce cuts that would affect 30,000 employeesaccording to Reuters. The layoffs will begin this week, will mark the largest cut to Amazon’s corporate workforce in the company’s history and will represent the largest layoffs in the technology industry since 2020.
Amazon is the second largest private employer in the United States with more than 1.54 million employees globally as of the end of the second quarter. This figure is mainly made up of your warehouse staff. It has approximately 350,000 corporate employees, those directly affected due to this round of layoffs that come after the 27,000 a couple of years ago.
Amazon has been cutting a smaller number of jobs over the past two years in several divisions, including devices, communications and podcasting. The cuts starting this week could affect various divisions, such as human resources, operations, devices and services and also the cloud services division, Amazon Web Services.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has already announced an initiative to reduce what he described as excessive bureaucracy, including reducing the number of managers. It set up an anonymous complaint line to identify inefficiencies, which has generated about 1,500 responses and more than 450 process changes, it said.
Jassy said in June that Increased use of AI tools would likely lead to more job cutsparticularly through the automation of repetitive and routine tasks. “It’s hard to know exactly how this will translate over time, but in the coming years we expect this (AI) to reduce our total corporate workforce.”the executive explained in a memo sent to staff.
All of this would confirm fears that AI technologies will lead to mass layoffs in some sectors. Reuters notes that Amazon is also under pressure to offset long-term investments in developing its AI infrastructure, which as we know are monumental and do not return short-term returns.
The full extent of this round of layoffs at Amazon is unknown. Sources familiar with the matter indicated that the figure could change over time as the company’s financial priorities change. Fortune previously reported that the human resources division could be hit by a roughly 15% cut. The program launched earlier this year to return employees to the office five days a week, one of the most stringent in the technology sector, had failed to reduce staff turnover and is cited as another reason for the magnitude of the workforce cuts.
As mass layoffs occur among corporate staff, Amazon anticipates another big holiday sales season and plans to offer 250,000 temporary jobs as support in warehouses, just as it has been doing in previous years.
