Amazon confirms laying off 14000 corporate employees; about 1000 roles may be impacted in India

Global e-commerce behemoth Amazon has officially confirmed that it is cutting approximately 14,000 corporate roles as it seeks to manage mounting expenses and stabilise its staffing levels following the pandemic-driven surge in hiring.

The announcement came on the heels of a Reuters report stating that Amazon was set to initiate its largest corporate job cut in years, with plans to eliminate approximately 30,000 positions starting Tuesday.

In a blog post, Beth Galetti, Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology at Amazon, announced that the corporate workforce will be reduced by approximately 14,000 roles.

“We’re working hard to support everyone whose role is impacted, including offering most employees 90 days to look for a new role internally, and our recruiting teams will prioritise internal candidates to help as many people as possible find new roles within Amazon. For our teammates who are unable to find a new role at Amazon or who choose not to look for one, we’ll offer them transition support, including severance pay, outplacement services, health insurance benefits, and more,” said Galetti.

“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,” Galetti further added.

The impact of this round of global restructuring will be felt in the company’s workforce in India, with 800-1,000 jobs may become redundant, according to a report published in The Economic Times, citing sources. According to the report, finance, human resources, and technology functions will be impacted, primarily affecting employees reporting to Amazon’s global team.

In an earlier development this month, reports surfaced that Amazon plans to significantly escalate its reliance on robotics, a strategic shift that could replace up to 600,000 human jobs by 2033, according to internal documents reviewed by The New York Times.

The Times report indicated that Amazon is developing and deploying more advanced robots primarily to meet rising demand without increasing its headcount.

Crucially, the internal documents also reveal a plan to manage the resulting social fallout: Amazon aims to cultivate an image as a "good corporate citizen" through community engagement. To control the public narrative, the company explicitly discusses substituting terms like "automation" and "AI" with "advanced technology," and using "cobot" instead of "robot" to frame the change as collaboration, the Times report said.

However, the company refutes these charges, claiming they are incomplete and misleading.

Amazon’s chief executive, Andy Jassy, has previously told employees that efficiency gains from artificial intelligence would reduce the size of the company’s corporate workforce. In a June companywide email, published on Amazon’s corporate blog, Jassy wrote that staff who adopt AI would be “well-positioned” while acknowledging that headcount would decline as technology is deployed more broadly.

Amazon continues to hire in other areas. Earlier in the month, the company announced plans to hire 250,000 temporary workers in the United States for its annual holiday-season surge in warehouses and logistics operations.