Shashi Tharoor, a member of Congress, is very worried about Amazon.com Inc.’s huge new round of layoffs. He called the news a “deeply worrying” warning for workers around the world.
On Tuesday, the internet and e-commerce giant said it would lay off some 14,000 corporate workers. Reports say that this is the biggest layoff in the company’s history. It comes just a few months after CEO Andy Jassy said that Artificial Intelligence (AI) would cut the number of employees. Some early reports said that the number of staff may be as high as 30,000.
What Kind of Cuts: No Job is “Safe”
Tharoor’s reaction came after he shared a piece by Shanaka Anslem Perera that called the cuts a “turning point” in the global workforce. The post made it clear how scary the affected roles were:
The layoffs mostly affected corporate workers, like engineers, managers, cloud architects, and HR specialists, rather than seasonal or warehouse workers.
Perera said that these cuts affected almost 10% of Amazon’s 350,000 corporate employees, which is more than the 27,000 layoffs that happened between 2022 and 2023.
Tharoor said on X, “We are seeing the future, and it’s deeply worrying,” since this kind of targeting of highly trained, usually “safe” jobs is what caused him to say that.
Amazon’s Plan: Cut Costs, Hire Too Many People, and Use AI
Amazon’s officials have said that the layoffs are necessary to decrease expenses and fix the problem of hiring too many people during the pandemic-driven rise in demand for cloud and e-commerce services. Over the past two years, the company has been steadily cutting back, which has affected areas including devices, communications, and podcasting.
The most recent round is likely to have an effect on important areas like operations, devices and services, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Human Resources (internally known as People Experience and Technology or PXT). On Monday, managers of the teams that were affected were apparently going through training sessions to get ready to send out the termination notices, which were supposed to go out on Tuesday morning.
Andy Jassy, the CEO, has been working hard to get rid of what he terms “too much bureaucracy.” He even set up an anonymous feedback line to find problems, and so far, it has led to more than 450 improvements in the company’s processes. In June, Jassy made it clear that the company’s growing usage of AI tools could lead to employment cuts.