The big tech layoffs are continuing apace, and it seems nobody is safe. Following this month’s massive staff cuts at Twitter and Meta, the New York Times reports that Amazon is now planning to let go of approximately 10,000 employees. Happy holidays, I guess.
Amazon’s upcoming job cuts will reportedly impact its corporate employees, specifically its retail division, human resources, and the team working on the company’s devices (which includes voice assistant Alexa).
Considering that Amazon employs over 1.5 million people across the globe, 10,000 workers laid off may not seem like a significant percentage from the company’s perspective. It amounts to about 0.7 percent of Amazon’s employees, which is a considerably smaller relative reduction than Twitter’s Elon Musk-induced layoffs that cut its workforce by around 50 percent.
But Amazon is also a much bigger company, with its planned layoffs eclipsing Twitter’s entire employee headcount even before Musk began burning everything to the ground. No matter how you slice it, 10,000 is an awful lot of people out of work just before the holidays.
Amazon’s cuts will reportedly occur in small waves, rather than replicating the lawless chaos of Twitter’s mass layoffs. Still, this is cold comfort to those potentially on the chopping block.
Mashable has reached out to Amazon for comment.
Amazon more than tripled its income during the COVID-19 pandemic, as shoppers turned to home delivery more frequently and smaller businesses struggled to stay afloat. However that boom has since subsided, plunging Amazon’s stock by 42 percent this year and knocking the company’s valuation back below $1 trillion. This downturn has practically returned Amazon to the position it was in before the pandemic began — which, while certainly not as high as its pandemic-fueled peak, still isn’t really anything for it to complain about.
This week Amazon founder and executive chair Jeff Bezos said he intends to donate the majority of his wealth to charity before he dies, after CNN directly questioned him on the matter. Perhaps he could start by distributing a few of his literal billions to Amazon’s workers, or at least hand out some generous severance packages. With a current net worth of over $121 billion, the fourth richest man in the world would just have to relinquish his grip on less than 0.09 percent of his wealth in order to give all 10,000 of his soon-to-be former employees $10,000 each.
