Amazon to shed thousands more workers in next few weeks

Amazon will shed 9,000 workers in the coming weeks, according to a memo sent to staff by CEO Andy Jassy on Monday.

The layoffs follow the company’s decision in November to slash its workforce by 18,000, meaning Amazon will soon have lost 27,000 workers in a matter of months.

While the November layoffs mostly impacted Amazon staffers in its retail, devices, recruiting, and human resources units, this latest round will mostly affect the company’s cloud computing, advertising, human resources, and Twitch departments.

In the memo, which Amazon later shared on its website, Jassy told staff: “Given the uncertain economy in which we reside, and the uncertainty that exists in the near future, we have chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount.

“The overriding tenet of our annual planning this year was to be leaner while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customers’ lives and Amazon as a whole.”

Mindful that some will be wondering why the company didn’t announce the latest cuts along with the original round of layoffs in November, the Amazon chief said that “not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall; and rather than rush through these assessments without the appropriate diligence, we chose to share these decisions as we’ve made them so people had the information as soon as possible.”

Amazon said it will support those who will soon find themselves out of work by offering packages that will include a separation payment, transitional health insurance benefits, and external job placement support.

The recent layoffs are the largest in Amazon’s history and follows a hiring spree that took place during the pandemic, CNBC News noted. It saw the  company’s global workforce grow to more than 1.6 million by the end of 2021, about double that of what it was two years earlier.

Amazon isn’t the only tech behemoth making significant jobs cuts, with others such as Meta, Alphabet, Twitter, Dell, and Spotify also taking similar action in the wake of uncertain economic conditions.

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