Amazon lays off 18,000 employees due to financial struggles

Amazon is a widely used website that has enlisted 1.5 million workers on the table from all around the globe. As it goes through the issues to save costs, it decided to discharge jobs.

Andy Jassy, Chief Executive at Amazon stated that the decision will affect the company’s e-commerce and human resource organization. He added that the company has “hired rapidly over the several years” hence, they’ll have to cut down jobs to balance the economy.

Andy further stated, “Companies that last a long time go through different phases. They’re not in the heavy people explanation mode every year”. As per him, most of this came forward as an employee was caught leaking the cuts out of his business boundaries.

Amazon faced a decrease in its sales majorly after it once flourished majorly during the pandemic as usual customers had nothing much to do and spent huge sums online.

As online businesses are aiming to save cash after having faced rock bottom situations, they’re going through issues that have led them to decrease their advertising revenues. And with much lesser sales, it’s hectic to cope with the brittle financial branches of their companies.

Apart from platforms like Amazon and AliExpress, big tech firms like WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram have even announced huge layoffs of jobs in their companies.

According to a published report by BBC, Amazon was working on gadgets like ‘Personal Delivery Robot’, better than a famously-known gadget, Alexa but it recently declined these projects as they weren’t good enough for day-to-day purchases and won’t be making money. 

The company cuts around 6% of the working staff which actually makes up a close estimate of 300,000 person heads. All this while changing the company’s motives and making them tighter to aim more competitively for quality over quantity and talent of work. 

In America alone, Amazon accounts for 1.5 million workers. A company that comes second in terms of employment after Walmart.

Douglas Harper, spokesperson for Spain’s largest trade union CCOO observed and spoke up about how what he saw was a total lack of information from the company. He assumes that these layoffs won’t only last within the corporate workforce but quite eventually proceed to the first step of layoffs in different operations of the company as well. “We don’t know how this will affect us in Spain”, he says. 

Amazon has stopped hiring new people for a while as well as stopped warehouse expansions in the aftermath of over-hiring during the times of Covid-19. Dan Ives of the investment firm Wedbush Securities firmly thinks that Amazon will face “more pain ahead” as the customers eventually become less attracted and close their doors of money.

Amazon cuts down 18,000 jobs whereas, in November, Facebook announced that it would cut down 13% of its workforce. Furthermore, Twitter decides to cut down its workforce to about 50% of what it already has after the app was bought by Elon Musk in October 2022. Workers from LinkedIn stated that Amazon started cutting off their jobs in November 2022 after they faced the issue.

All the process was initiated last year when the company first made up its mind to cuts off jobs in huge numbers without telling much of the time and figures.

Over time, Amazon’s share price has halved and this affected many heads of the company. Consumers made fewer purchases as the company got older and this caused slower growth. The uneven seasons of business made the company suffer in various ways. So the best way to balance all of it out was the layoffs. And decreasing the staff they once hired. 

When they first started in November, the number of cut-downs was estimated at 10,000. Though, it has increased to 18,000 now. Amazon changed drastically in the eyes of its customers as it was able to provide them efficiently during the times of pandemic but now has been just a mere website that hardly fulfills the demands. 

Amazon decided to announce the news after telling the affected staff members but due to a leak, they announced the plans before all of this could occur. Jassy said: “Amazon has weathered uncertain and difficult economies in the past and we will continue to do so”. 

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Zalah Khan
Zalah is LLB Graduate from the University of Westminster and joined the hopdes team in June 2022. She has been a linguistics expert and interpreter for a few years at Pearl Linguistics in London dealing with people mostly from the middle-east side. She loves the thrills and adventures embedded deeply into her genes owing to her biracial Pashtun and Persian heritage. She speaks Urdu, Arabic, Persian, Pashtu and English. Whilst she is afraid of heights but her adrenaline pushes her to take the 60-foot leap of faith body slide everytime she is at the Aqua Venture Water Park in Dubai. She recently went onto the Jebel Jais Flight at speeds of up to 150km/h (93mph) along a 2.8km (1.7-mile) cable weighing more than six tonnes. She was last seen at the Museum Of Illusions at the Dubai Creek.

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