Amazon Inc announced a second round of layoffs on Monday, which would result in the termination of 9000 roles.
Amazon Inc announced a second round of layoffs on Monday, which would result in the termination of 9000 roles, adding on to the flurry of layoffs happening in the tech sector. Just last month, the company laid off 18,000 workers, which brings the total to a staggering 27,000 job roles being eliminated. The company is short of roughly 9% of its once 300,000-strong workforce.
CEO Andy Jassy stated that the cuts would occur in the coming weeks and will affect human resources, advertising, Amazon Web Services, and the Twitch live streaming service groups. The layoffs in January focused heavily on Amazon’s recruiting and human resources teams, as well as its retail group and devices teams. Amazon has been on a spree of laying off a majority of corporate roles after the company hired too many people during the pandemic.
The announcement comes less than a week after Meta Platforms Inc., the owner of Facebook announced its decision to lay off another 10,000 employees and close an additional 5,000 open roles in its second round of layoffs. Some other valuable corporations that severed ties with their employees were Microsoft Corp, Alphabet Inc., Dell Technologies Inc., and International Business Machines Corp. According to data compiled by Bloomberg, more than 67,000 jobs had been eliminated across the industry, as of early February.
The company’s stock saw a fall of 1.8% after the announcement. Amazon stated last month that the operating profit may continue to see a slump in the current quarter, due to the financial impact of consumers and the decline in spending by cloud customers.
Addressing the staff in a note that was posted online, CEO Andy Jassy stated that the decision was the result of an ongoing analysis of priorities and uncertainty about the economy. He went on to say that these role reductions weren’t announced previously due to the fact that not all teams were finished with their analyses in the late fall.
Owing to fears of a potential recession, Amazon started making trims in quite a few areas. It shut down services like its virtual primary care offering for employers. It has also shut down a subsidiary that has been selling fabrics for almost 30 years. Earlier this month, the company also decided to pause construction on its headquarters in northern Virginia, though the project’s first phase is set to open this June and welcome 8,000 employees.
Amazon had a workforce consisting of both warehouse workers and corporate roles that doubled in about two years. But as the worst of the pandemic had passed, the demand had reduced, and the company decided to pause or cancel its warehouse expansion plans in order to cut down on unnecessary costs.
According to a consulting firm, Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., it seems to be a follow-up of a bleak trend from 2022, when 97,171 job cuts were announced in the tech sector, which was up by 649% compared to last year. Labor and activist group, the Athena Coalition, is critical of Amazon and in a statement said that CEO Andy Jassy is choosing to make these layoffs happen to “pad Amazon’s bottom line” and that “none of these layoffs have to happen.”
