One of the world’s largest corporations is trimming its corporate staffing and reportedly eyeing other ways to cut its massive workforce.
Amazon will reduce its corporate workforce by 14,000 people by the end of 2025, Beth Galleti, the global retailer’s senior vice president of people experience and technology, wrote in an Oct. 28 message to employees that was then shared with the public.
Galetti said the company has seen a lot of progress in the past year to streamline operations and the company is performing well, saying Amazon is “delivering great customer experiences every day, innovating at a rapid rate, and producing strong business results.”
The recent layoff announcement is a continuation of that effort.
“What we need to remember is that the world is changing quickly,” Galetti said in the memo. “This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones). We’re convinced that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business.”
Most staff whose positions are being eliminated are being given three months to seek other roles with Amazon and internal candidates will be prioritized by the company’s recruiting teams. Severance pay, outplacement assistance and health insurance benefits are among the supports the company is offering workers who will leave Amazon.
Amazon employs 1.2 million people in the U.S. In the Tri-Cities, its delivery station in Pasco, which opened earlier this year, employs as many as 400 people in the warehouse and as delivery drivers. The company is also financially backing the development of small modular reactors, or SMRs, with Energy Northwest and X-energy as a means to secure power for its data centers.
The retailer’s efforts to become more lean aren’t just impacting its own workforce. JARDE LLC of Bremerton, a delivery services provider, recently announced it would close “due to an unforeseen and unexpected termination of our service contract by Amazon Logistics,” according the letter it filed on Oct. 24 with the state’s Employment Security Department. JARDE employed 110 people at its Bremerton facility.
And more job cuts could be coming. An internal Amazon memo acquired by The New York Times indicates Amazon leadership thinks employing more robots in its operations could enable it to replace half a million of its U.S. employees and avoid hiring another 160,000 by 2027.
The memo also reportedly states Amazon believes referring to its robots as “cobots” (short for “collaborative robots”) could make its workforce transformation more publicly acceptable.
Amazon disputed that it is seeking any widescale reduction in human employees by using robots in an official statement to the New York Daily News.
“Leaked documents often paint an incomplete and misleading picture of our plans, and that’s the case here,” an Amazon spokesman said. “In this instance, the materials appear to reflect the perspective of just one team and don’t represent our overall hiring strategy across our various operations business lines — now or moving forward,” the company’s statement said.