After Amazon announced in early November that it plans to freeze hiring at corporate offices, the giant retailer is now axing 18,000 jobs. According to BBC, this is one of the biggest job cuts in the company’s history.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says they’ve hired rapidly during the past several years, and now due to an “uncertain economy,” they have no choice but to lay off employees. Amazon Fresh, Go, and the human resources division will see the most job cuts. Back in November, Amazon also laid off a number of its employees across the Devices and Books businesses.
Jassy continues that they know how this decision might affect employees’ lives. The departed employees will get separation payments, transitional health insurance benefits, and external job placement support. The impacted employees will get their dismissal notice by January 18.
“Companies that last a long time go through different phases. They’re not in heavy people expansion mode every year.” Amazon CEO said.
Amazon is cutting 18,000 jobs due to rigid economic conditions
The giant retailer hired thousands of new employees during the pandemic to be able to respond to the skyrocketing demands. However, the pandemic is now settled, and online orders have decreased with the opening of physical stores. Of course, cutting 18,000 jobs wasn’t that much unexpected because the giant trailer announced last year that it wanted to reduce its workforce. The company also canceled some of its projects, like a personal delivery robot.
Amazon has over 1.5 million employees around the world. It needs to be determined which countries get affected by the job cuts, but the company’s employees across Europe will certainly get impacted.
Amazon is one of many big tech companies that are laying off its employees. Most Silicon Valley companies are sending dismissal letters to their workforces. Google, Meta, Apple, NVIDIA, and more have announced their job-cut plans in recent months. No need to mention that Twitter fired over 50% of its workforce under Elon Musk. More companies are also expected to join the bandwagon.
2023-01-05 15:07:20