Amazon plans to lay off thousands of employees
While Jeff Bezos is going to give all his fortune to charity in Amazon itself, large-scale layoffs have begun, which will affect 10,000 company employees, according to The New York Times.
According to a report by The New York Times, Amazon plans to lay off approximately 10,000 employees in corporate and technology roles starting this week. These cuts will be the largest in the company’s history and will primarily affect Amazon’s device divisions (Kindle, Alexa, Astro, etc.), retail and human resources.
Despite these seemingly huge numbers, on the scale of Amazon, which employs 950,000 people in the US alone (July 2021) and more than 1,544,000 workers worldwide (September 2022), it is a pittance of less than 1 %.
In fact, layoffs at tech companies are not uncommon in 2022, for example Meta is set to lay off more than 11,000 employees to cut costs. In Twitter, with the submission of a new owner it’s hard to understand what’s going on at all.
As for Amazon, according to the company’s CEO Andy Jassy, even more layoffs and “optimization” await one of the largest companies in the world in 2023. “We haven’t concluded yet exactly how many other roles will be impacted (we know that there will be reductions in our Stores and PXT organizations), but each leader will communicate to their respective teams when we have the details nailed down.” – Andy Jassy said.
And although the CEOs of technology companies blame the cuts for the most part on the unfavorable economic situation, the consequences of COVID-19 and remote work, the Russian-Ukrainian war and the global crisis it caused, it seems that the main reason is the over-inflated staff of most tech giants, which during the wave of growth were a little careless in hiring employees.
P.S. Photo – Amazon Spheres, a state-of-the-art greenhouse at Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle that is only accessible to company employees.