Amazon plans to lay off about 10,000 employees, according to the NYTimes

On the verge of entering the increase in work for the next sales season, with Black Friday and Christmas, Amazon is preparing to lay off 10,000 people, according to The New York Times, which would make the company the last American technology giant in responding to the economic crisis with a job cut plan. In the long list of technology companies in the United States are also Meta, Twitter, Lyft, Robinhood and Coinbase.

This would be the largest cut in the company’s history and would represent approximately 3% of Amazon’s corporate employees and less than 1% of its global workforce of more than 1.6 million.

An important part of the workforce is made up of seasonal workers, hired when activity increases, for example at the end of the year holidays.

According to the newspaper, the figure could change. But if confirmed, it would be the largest job cut in the company’s history.

Contacted by news agencies, Amazon had no immediate comment.

Post-pandemic effects

The cuts will target Amazon’s device organization, including the Alexa voice assistant, as well as its retail division and human resources, noted the sources, who spoke to the outlet on condition of anonymity.

Online shopping giant Amazon – one of the country’s top employers – has yet to make the layoff official, but said two weeks ago it had decided to pause corporate hiring because the economy was “in an uncertain place.”

Layoffs are a trend that is spreading across all trades, with half of US companies downsizing or planning to downsize, according to a survey of 700 executives and board members from various industries last month.

According to the data obtained by the consultancy, 51% of those surveyed have started layoffs or are planning to start layoffs, and their impact is beginning to be felt in technology companies that prospered during the pandemic, especially social networks and online sales. and now they feel the withdrawal of the post-pandemic.

Other companies affected

“At the start of covid-19, the world moved rapidly to digital and the rise of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth,” he noted last week in a statement the delegate of Meta – parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger – Mark Zuckerberg.

Meta, like other tech giants, went on a hiring spree during the pandemic, adding more than 27,000 employees to its workforce between 2020 and 2021 and another 15,344 workers in the first nine months of this year.

For his part, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and the new owner of Twitter, laid off half the staff of a workforce of some 7,500 people worldwide.

“Regarding the reduction of the labor force of Twitter, unfortunately there is no other option when the company is losing more than 4 million dollars per day”Musk noted in a tweet.

For its part, the shared car rental company with a driver Lyft also said it would cut 13% of its employees and Stripe, a payment processing platform, said it would eliminate 14% of its employees, approximately 1,100 jobs. (YO)