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Amazon Plans To Cut As Many As 30,000 Corporate Jobs Beginning Tomorrow (reuters.com) 42

Amazon is planning to cut as many as 30,000 corporate jobs beginning Tuesday, as the company works to pare expenses and compensate for overhiring during the peak demand of the pandemic, Reuters reported Monday, citing sources familiar with the matter. From the report: The figure represents a small percentage of Amazon's 1.55 million total employees, but nearly 10% of the company's roughly 350,000 corporate employees. This would represent the largest job cut at Amazon since around 27,000 jobs were eliminated starting in late 2022.
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Amazon Plans To Cut As Many As 30,000 Corporate Jobs Beginning Tomorrow

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  • This announcement provides the yang to the holiday ying Amazon likes to trumpet.
  • If you can afford to fire 30K people it means you were probably operating inefficiently in the first place.
    • Spoken like a true hedge fund manager!

    • by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Monday October 27, 2025 @03:37PM (#65753932) Homepage Journal

      Every employee is a person wiling to sell their labor for less than a competent employer can make from it. The purpose of hiring is to take a collection of people, put them to a task, and pay them a portion of what you make off it. This is called your profit.

      Every layoff is a company admitting that they can't figure how to make money under capitalism. Most likely it is an overweight management structure that can't be supported by thinner margins during an economic downturn. But the decision makers aren't going to cut their own jobs, despite not producing anything of value themselves.

      • by gtall ( 79522 )

        "Every layoff is a company admitting that they can't figure how to make money under capitalism." No it isn't, sometimes it is just the company "management" feeling they are entitled to more money for themselves. Some companies work for the best interest of their management, not the company as a whole. And management is transitory, making off with the goods and leaving a decrepit shell of a company is considered "good business" in the management circles. Transitory management just encourages this sort of beh

    • If you can afford to fire 30K people it means you were probably operating inefficiently in the first place.

      If you can hire 30k people you didn't need but 3 years later are able to accurately identify who those 30k people are, then you have done the impossible and morphed from being an incompetent manager to being God.

      More practically, Amazon and most companies don't need to identify the workers they don't need. They just need to announce to Wall Street that they cut a bunch of workers, all of which were unneeded, leading to a huge increase in their stock price and more importantly executive bonuses.

  • Buried the lede (Score:5, Insightful)

    by thaabit ( 901504 ) on Monday October 27, 2025 @03:09PM (#65753844) Homepage
    Key phrase: "The company plans to report third quarter earnings on Thursday."
  • by blue trane ( 110704 ) on Monday October 27, 2025 @03:09PM (#65753848) Homepage Journal

    Or AI? Wouldn't the world be perfect if only Trump and AI were banned?

    • by sjames ( 1099 )

      Or at least replace Trump with an AI.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        Or at least replace Trump with an AI.

        They're trying to make AI smarter, not reverse course.

      • How do you know for certain he wasn't already? Seems to be trying to understand how tariffs work through machine learning.

      • When I say be careful what you wish for, what I mean in this instance is BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR!

        Do you honestly think the bottom dweller portion of the base is going to know the difference or care whether Trump is real or an AI creation that lives indefinitely?

    • But mostly Trump's tariffs.

      I mean that. We have pretty solid numbers that without Trump's tariffs inflation would be 2%. At 2% inflation we would be getting rapid cuts to interest rates that would create a boom in the economy. Meanwhile Trump has pulled back tens of billions of dollars of funding from Congress that he is illegally withholding from States and he has chased away about 60 billion dollars in tourist dollars with his ice thugs.

      I know people don't like hearing it but Donald Trump really i
  • Chop Chop Chop (Score:4, Insightful)

    by hwstar ( 35834 ) on Monday October 27, 2025 @03:14PM (#65753860)

    They aren't the only ones doing the chopping.

    https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/24/tech-layoffs-2025-list/

    What we are seeing here is the beginning of a recession. The total number of unemployed workers is going to go up by a few million once the recession takes hold.

    Meanwhile everything will be getting more expensive once the cost of the tariffs are passed on to the consumer.

    Humans have become too expensive to employ and provide health insurance for. AI and robots will take over.

    More evidence we are living in the "Precarious Economy"

    • by KalvinB ( 205500 )

      It’s definitely true that a lot of companies are cutting workers right now — and that creates real anxiety about where things are headed. But I think the narrative that “humans have become too expensive” flips the real issue upside-down.

      Labor isn’t what’s skyrocketed in cost. CEO pay, shareholder expectations, and relentless targets for profit growth are. Companies keep raising prices even while laying off thousands, not because they can’t afford workers, but becaus

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • by KalvinB ( 205500 )

          Corporations don’t exist to hand out jobs — completely agree. They hire people because human creativity, judgment, and problem-solving generate more value than they cost. That’s the foundational engine of economic growth.

          But saying “companies don’t create work to hire people” assumes the amount of work is fixed, like slices of a pie. History tells a different story. Every major leap in technology — electricity, assembly lines, computers, the internet — didn

          • by hwstar ( 35834 )

            There's an old saying: "You can t cut your way to profitability" It takes more than that. You need a coveted product and customers who are able to afford it as well.

            Delighting customers seems to have fallen by the wayside. Nowadays, there seems to be a arrogant "Take it or leave it" attitude projected by many companies when selling products or hiring employees. Instead it's management, and then distantly, the shareholders which are on the receiving end of the delight.

          • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • I agree with you. Most of the money is going where it will do the least good. Not just for people, the planet, etc, but for the economy and US empire in the long run.
        Most workers haven't seen a raise that matches inflation unless they jump up the ladder a few rungs. People have been getting 0-1% raises for decades. Inflation that low only occurs in years where markets are reeling from self-inflicted disaster, like 2009.
        Notice that healthcare costs keep going up, while the coverage provided by plans keeps go

      • by RedK ( 112790 )

        Do you have a plumber work on your home 40 hours a week, on your payroll ? An Electrician ? What about a few roofers ?

        No ? You only hire them when you have work for them to do and then pay and thank them ?

        Well, you might just not be thinking like a builder. You're shrinking your own future potential!

        See how silly that sounds ? More people isn't always a good thing. When there's no work, there's no work. You don't hire people for no good reason. And no, more people can't make you "grow faster". 9 w

    • Re:Chop Chop Chop (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Tailhook ( 98486 ) on Monday October 27, 2025 @03:56PM (#65754000)

      once the cost of the tariffs are passed on to the consumer

      Still waiting for that, huh?

      • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday October 27, 2025 @05:00PM (#65754150)
        The reason you haven't felt the worst of the tariffs and the worst of that national sales tax is company's stocked up before Trump's taxes went into effect.

        Those stocks are now depleted and they are gradually shifting those costs on to you. They have already said repeatedly in various news articles that they intend to do it slowly so as to not create price shock.

        Basically it's boiling a frog only the frog is smart enough to jump out of the hot water. We're getting boiled alive because half of us are too busy freaking out over trans girls playing field hockey in the Midwest and the other half somehow inexplicably believe that the Republican party is better for the economy despite their entire lives directly witnessing the opposite.
      • Re:Chop Chop Chop (Score:4, Interesting)

        by linuxguy ( 98493 ) on Monday October 27, 2025 @06:01PM (#65754344) Homepage

        >> once the cost of the tariffs are passed on to the consumer

        > Still waiting for that, huh?

        Honest question. Are you expecting other countries to pay the tariffs?

    • Was guaranteed to put us into a recession and that means Mass layoffs.
  • Mostly worthless, but may fire WATER during expansion break.
  • The rest get shipped out for free.
  • So what company fires 30 000 of its staff on “day one”??

  • From the article, the CEO said: "Amazon has also been under pressure in the short-term to offset the long-term investments in building out its AI infrastructure."

    Translation: We spent a lot of money on capital for AI, and now we need to fix the short-term balance sheet.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      Can someone explain the difference? Or its significance.

      Broadly speaking, there are three different "categories" of Amazon employees: corporate, distribution, and AWS.
      AWS has been, until recently, the golden children because they were so very profitable.
      Distribution are all the people who work in the distribution centers, including all the sorters and warehouse people. These are the lowest paid of the group, and the only folks who get free Prime as a benefit.
      Corporate is, generally, everyone else, to include the app developers, software developers, Devices and S

  • It's because you're planning on shifting work to anyone that survives. This is a little less than 10% of their corporate staff which is batshit when you think about it but there it is.

    I don't know how this is going to work for Amazon because I've known people that do and they work them like dogs to the point where they're already all doing 996. I don't see how you can get any more productivity out of them to make up for the people you're about to fire and I do not believe for a instant that they are jus
  • Another outage (Score:4, Interesting)

    by kyoko21 ( 198413 ) on Monday October 27, 2025 @05:38PM (#65754298)

    Is this a nice way to say we're getting another outage tomorrow?

  • They cut xx number of jobs, then in 9 months they report the profit went up so the CEO gets a bonus?
  • There is a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act and it looks like this is a foreseen layoff with plenty enough employees so I assume the quote from the reporter "Amazon is planning to cut as many as 30,000 corporate jobs beginning Tuesday" that very few will be cut Tuesday but will be given 60 days notice because that includes most non-executive management as well as regular employees.

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