Amazon confirms the layoff of 14,000 employees worldwide to reduce its corporate structure
Amazon confirms a reduction in the workforce by 14,000 corporate employees, those workers who perform administrative and office tasks, a figure lower than that reported this Monday in various media, which The affected positions rose to around 30,000. Amazon’s global workforce is estimated at around 1.5 million people, of which around 350,000 perform corporate jobs.
The measure, reported by Beth Galetti, senior vice president of People Experience and Technology at Amazon, aims to maintain an agile and adequate structure, reducing bureaucracy, eliminating layers and redirecting resources to guarantee investment in the company’s big bets to respond to current and future needs of the clients. “While this will include reductions in some areas and hiring in others, it will involve an overall reduction in our corporate workforce of approximately 14,000 positions,” Galetti said.
“We are convinced that we need a more agile organization, with less layers and greater responsibility, to move forward as quickly as possible for our clients and our business,” said the executive, highlighting that AI is the most transformative technology that has been seen since the Internet and allows companies to innovate much faster than ever.
The online retailer and cloud computing services provider is scheduled to release its quarterly results this Thursday. Between April and June the firm exceeded market expectations, after announcing a 13% increase in revenue to $167.7 billion (just over 143,985 million euros at the current exchange rate) and a net profit of 18,200 million dollars (around 15,626 million euros). Specialized in e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, streaming digital and artificial intelligence (AI), is part of the “Magnificent Seven”, along with Tesla, Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple, Meta and Alphabet.
The management of Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has been marked by staff cuts and the closure of several projects. The reductions of gradually at the end of 2022 and beginning of 2023, eliminating some 27,000 positions. Amazon has been announcing layoffs for the past two years in several divisions, including devices, communications, podcasting and others.
The company has assured that it will try to provide support to those affected, providing a period of 90 days to search for a new position internally and prioritizing internal candidates to help the greatest number possible of people to find new positions on Amazon itself. Looking ahead to 2026, the multinational expects to continue hiring in key strategic areas, while continuing to look for new positions where it is possible to reduce levels and achieve efficiency improvements.
The CEO defends the need to automate more of the company’s work, as the company’s structure remains “overstretched” due to mass hiring during the pandemic, despite cutting jobs over the past three years. Signs of corporate austerity emerged in June. Amazon set more aggressive workforce reduction goals over the summer and failed to fill vacant positions in its corporate logistics and advertising operations, according to people familiar with the matter.
It also happens that last week several executives of the technology company revealed to The New York Times that the company was finalizing a plan that would transform its work centers and that would involve replacing more than half a million workers with robots.
