Amazon plans to lay off 18,000 employees, 8,000 more than announced

Amazonia announced the layoff of about 18,000 employees, much higher than the 10,000 it announced in November last year. The two areas most affected will be sales to the public (retail) and “recruitment”, that is, the personnel recruitment area.

This is the largest reduction recorded in the last year in the technology environment, amid a setback in large companies, amid economic uncertainty.

The layoffs are concentrated in the company’s corporate ranks, which make up about 5% of that portion of its workforce and 1.2% of its overall workforce. 1.5 million employees in September.

The Seattle-based company said in November it was starting layoffs, with cuts focused on its business, procurement and device retail operations. At the time, The Wall Street Journal reported that the cuts would amount to about 10,000 people.

Thousands of those cuts began last year, with the rest bringing the total number of layoffs to more than 18,000 in the coming weeks.

The CEO’s explanation

The news was released on Wednesday. From this, the CEO of the company, Andy Jassy, explained on the company blog. “Amazon has weathered uncertain and difficult economies in the past and we will continue to do so,” said Jassy.

He added that most of the cuts are in “Amazon’s retail and recruiting areas.” The blog post says the company will notify affected employees by the end of the month.

Amazon has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the coronavirus pandemic. COVID-19 as customers flocked to online shopping. The rush for Amazon’s various businesses, from e-commerce to consumer stores (including groceries) to cloud computing, has fueled years of growth for the company. To keep up with demand, Amazon doubled its logistics network and added hundreds of thousands of employees.

When demand started to decline with customers returning to shop in stores, Amazon started a thorough review of cost reduction reduce unprofitable units.

In the spring and summer, the company made targeted cuts to reduce costs, closing brick-and-mortar stores and business units like Amazon Care. Amazon later announced a company-wide hiring freeze before deciding to lay off employees.

The tech scenario: generalized layoffs

Amazon’s layoffs of more than 18,000 employees would represent the majority of people laid off from a tech company in recent months, according to tallies posted on a site called Layoffs.fyi, a website that tracks events as they occur in media reports and corporate communications.

The trend has hit companies like Amazon and others who, in many cases, have acknowledged that they have grown too fast.

Meta, like other tech giants, has been on a hiring rush during the pandemic, adding more than 27,000 employees to its workforce between 2020 and 2021, and more 15,344 workers in the first nine months of this year.

For his part, Elon Musk, owner of Twitter, has fired half of a staff of about 7,500 people worldwide.

“As far as cutting Twitter’s workforce, unfortunately there’s no other option when the company is losing over $4 million a day,” Musk wrote in a tweet.

For its part, the shared car rental company with driver Lift it also said it will cut 13% of its employees and Stripe, a payment processing platform, said it will cut 14% of its employees, about 1,100 jobs.