Amazon to cut 14,000 jobs across corporate workforce

[SAN FRANCISCO] Amazon.com said it was cutting about 14,000 jobs in a major restructuring.

The positions will be eliminated across the corporate workforce, Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology at Amazon said on Tuesday (Oct 28) in a blog post. “The reductions we’re sharing today are a continuation of this work to get even stronger by further reducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure we’re investing in our biggest bets and what matters most to our customers’ current and future needs.”

The terminations could affect as many as 30,000 jobs, Reuters reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The online retailer and cloud computing provider, which employed 1.55 million people globally as of June 30, on Thursday is scheduled to report earnings for the quarter that ended Sept 30. The tenure of Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy has been punctuated by job cuts and the shuttering of various projects. He initiated rolling reductions in late 2022 and early 2023 that ultimately eliminated some 27,000 corporate roles.

In June, Jassy signalled that Amazon’s workforce would likely get smaller as the company increases its use of artificial intelligence to complete tasks normally handled by people. The CEO continues to stress that more of the company’s work should be automated, and that it remains bloated from a pandemic-era hiring binge despite trimming jobs over the past three years, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Signs of corporate belt-tightening arrived soon after Jassy’s AI comments. Amazon set more aggressive attrition targets over the summer and didn’t fill vacant positions in its corporate logistics and advertising operations, according to people familiar with the matter. BLOOMBERG