Congress MP Shashi Tharoor has expressed concern over Amazon’s massive round of layoffs, calling it a worrying sign of where the world of work is headed.
Amazon.com Inc. said on Tuesday it will cut roughly 14,000 corporate jobs just months after its chief executive officer (CEO) Andy Jassy warned that AI will shrink firm’s workforce.
Reuters reported earlier that as many as 30,000 people in Amazon would lose their jobs.
“We are seeing the future, and it’s deeply worrying,” Tharoor wrote on X, resharing a post about Amazon’s decision to cut thousands of jobs, the largest layoff in the company’s history.
Tharoor said the above, resharing a post by Shanaka Anslem Perera who described the development as a turning point in the global workforce.
“Amazon just announced 30,000 layoffs… the largest in company history,” Perera wrote, adding that the scale and nature of these cuts mark a fundamental shift in how technology companies are restructuring their operations.
Perera noted that the layoffs affected 10 percent of Amazon’s 350,000-strong corporate workforce, including engineers, managers, cloud architects and HR professionals, rather than warehouse or seasonal staff.
“The ‘safe’ jobs,” he wrote, highlighting that these cuts surpass the 27,000 layoffs made between 2022 and 2023.
More about the Amazon layoffs
The move is reportedly aimed at cutting costs and addressing the over-hiring that took place during the pandemic-driven surge in demand.
Over the past two years, Amazon has been steadily downsizing its workforce across divisions such as devices, communications, and podcasting.
The layoffs were to begin Tuesday onwards.
It will reportedly impact departments including human resources, known internally as People Experience and Technology (PXT), as well as operations, devices and services, and Amazon Web Services, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Managers are being trained to communicate
The above-mentioned people added that managers of the affected teams were asked to attend a training session on Monday on how to communicate with employees after the layoffs begin.
Termination notices were expected to start rolling out on Tuesday morning, they said.
This latest round of job cuts comes as CEO Andy Jassy pushes to eliminate what he has called an excess of “bureaucracy”.
He even introduced an anonymous feedback line to flag inefficiencies, which has already led to more than 450 process changes within the company.
In June, Jassy had hinted at possible layoffs due to Amazon’s growing use of artificial intelligence tools.
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