Amazon Plans To Cut As Many As 30,000 Corporate Jobs Beginning Tomorrow (reuters.com)
- Reference: 0179885520
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/10/27/1852239/amazon-plans-to-cut-as-many-as-30000-corporate-jobs-beginning-tomorrow
- Source link: https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/amazon-targets-many-30000-corporate-job-cuts-sources-say-2025-10-27/
> 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.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/amazon-targets-many-30000-corporate-job-cuts-sources-say-2025-10-27/
Good (Score:2)
If you can afford to fire 30K people it means you were probably operating inefficiently in the first place.
Re: (Score:2)
> Every profitable company can afford to fire every employee. Staff cuts are not a good model to judge how a well run business should behave.
Wall Street and the investment class completely disagree with you.
Re: (Score:2)
Spoken like a true hedge fund manager!
It's a type of incompetence (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
> 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)
Key phrase: "The company plans to report third quarter earnings on Thursday."
Is this Trump's tariffs? (Score:3, Funny)
Or AI? Wouldn't the world be perfect if only Trump and AI were banned?
Re: (Score:2)
Or at least replace Trump with an AI.
Re:Is this Trump's tariffs? (Score:4, Insightful)
> Or at least replace Trump with an AI.
They're trying to make AI smarter, not reverse course.
Little bit of both probably (Score:3)
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:3, Insightful)
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"
Re: (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:3)
> The biggest missed opportunity here is that automation doesn’t have to be a replacement strategy — it can be a redeployment strategy. When new technology lets humans spend less time on low-value labor, companies can empower them to drive innovation, serve customers better, develop new products, and ultimately create more wealth.
Corporations hire human beings to do work that makes them money. They don't create work to hire human beings.
Re: (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
> But saying “companies don’t create work to hire people” assumes the amount of work is fixed, like slices of a pie.
No, it just means that they create work and then hire people, not the other way around.
> before someone imagined them.
1. That person was hired to imagine them. 2. The corporation then hired other people to implement that imagination. They did not hire people and then try to imagine what they would have them do. There are rare situations in which a company might start a new line of business because they had employees with a set of skills. But that is not the usual way companies grow.
Re: (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:3)
> once the cost of the tariffs are passed on to the consumer
Still waiting for that, huh?
Not for much longer you ain't (Score:3)
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
Re: (Score:2)
> 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?
Trump's national sales tax (Score:3)
Was guaranteed to put us into a recession and that means Mass layoffs.
Managerial Pidgy (Score:1)
Mostly worthless, but may fire WATER during expansion break.
Keep only Amazon Prime employees (Score:2)
The rest get shipped out for free.
Always “day one”? (Score:2)
So what company fires 30 000 of its staff on “day one”??
Fire one million (Score:2)
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0mO6UY6uTg
AI capital spending (Score:2)
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.
How is a "corporate employee" different? (Score:2)
> 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.
Can someone explain the difference? Or its significance.
Re: (Score:1)
> 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
Traditionally when you lay off this number (Score:2)
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:2)
Is this a nice way to say we're getting another outage tomorrow?
Holiday job surge in reverse (Score:1)
This announcement provides the yang to the holiday ying Amazon likes to trumpet.