From: elmatador | 11/14/2022 12:56:06 PM | | | | Amazon Set to Lay Off 10,000 Employees (Report)
By Todd Spangler
Facing a slowdown in sales, Amazon plans to lay off about 10,000 employees in corporate and technology positions, starting as soon as this week, the New York Times reported.
Citing anonymous sources, the Times reported that the layoffs will be concentrated on Amazon’s devices group, including the Alexa voice assistant, along with its retail and HR groups.
The job cuts — which would be the largest in Amazon’s history — would represent about 3% of corporate headcount.
The layoffs would represent less than 1% of Amazon’s total employee base of more than 1.5 million, mostly comprised of hourly workers.
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment. The reported job cuts at Amazon come after other tech companies have axed their workforces, including Meta, Snap and Twitter.
Even with the layoffs in corporate jobs, Amazon last month said it intends to hire 150,000 employees throughout the U.S. in full-time, part-time and seasonal roles across its operations network to handle the expected 2022 holiday-shopping surge. The ecommerce giant expects revenue growth to slow down considerably in Q4, projecting net sales for the year-end quarter to be between $140 billion and $148 billion, or to grow between 2% and 8% compared with Q4 2021.
Per the Times report, Amazon two weeks ago froze corporate hiring across the company including the AWS cloud computing division for the next few months.
In announcing Q3 earnings, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company has “a set of initiatives that we’re methodically working through that we believe will yield a stronger cost structure for the business moving forward.“
“There is obviously a lot happening in the macroeconomic environment, and we’ll balance our investments to be more streamlined without compromising our key long-term, strategic bets,” Jassy said |
| The Financial Collapse of 2001 Unwinding | Stock Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read |
|
To: DinoNavarre who wrote (9918) | 11/15/2022 8:36:24 AM | From: elmatador | | | Tech lay-offs teach us a lesson about the ‘war for talent’
Benevolent workplace dictatorships can seem fine until they’re not so benevolent any more
Sarah O’Connor Tue Nov 15 2022 - 11:42
Once upon a time, young graduates thought they had a choice to make: they could become rich but miserable in an investment bank or law firm, or they could live without a huge salary but do something more fun.
Then the big technology companies came along. Suddenly, it was possible for someone with a certain set of skills to have fun and get rich at the same time.
The tech firms seemed to represent a less hierarchical world of work where everyone wore jeans and T-shirts and merit was what mattered most. The salaries were high and the stock options plentiful.
If you were lucky, your employer would also take care of the boring parts of life, doing your laundry for you, cooking you meals and taking you home at night. This year, tech companies accounted for five of the top 10 places to work in the US based on employee reviews on Glassdoor.
Policymakers and economists soon came to see tech workers as the archetypal winners of the 21st century economy: firmly at the “lovely” end of the growing gap between “lovely” and “lousy” jobs.
When some employees in the sector tried to unionise, the response from companies and investors was often to argue these were already dream jobs, so what was the point?
As one investor put it, tech workers trying to unionise were “appropriating the language of exploited coal miners while enjoying the most privileged, white-collar work experience in human history”.
Tech companies might have offered amazing perks, but people don’t need dream jobs as much as they need jobs that treat them decently
That story has been punctured by a series of mass lay-offs by tech companies in recent weeks. Meta has sacked 11,000 workers or 13 per cent of its workforce.
Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, has reduced the group’s headcount by half. Amazon plans to cut about 10,000 jobs, while Stripe, a private payments company, culled 14 per cent of workers. It has been a brutal experience for staff.
In most cases (Twitter is a somewhat different story) the job cuts are the reversal of a recent hiring binge. Tech companies had bet on the continuation of an unusual macroeconomic environment that was in fact about to end.
Consumers are no longer confined to their homes with only ecommerce to spend their money on. Interest rates are no longer at rock bottom. Elmat NOTE: Covid kept people at homes WITH MONEY to spend !
It’s hardly the end of these companies. Meta still has more staff than it did last year. But the mass lay-offs do offer a couple of lessons.
The first is that, whether or not everyone is wearing jeans, many tech companies are highly autocratic. It was striking – and refreshing – to see chief executives take personal responsibility for the lay-offs. But it was also a reminder of how much power they have.
At Meta, for example, investors have been increasingly frustrated by how much money chief executive Mark Zuckerberg was sinking into the “metaverse”. But Meta’s dual share structure allows him, with 13 per cent of the equity, to control more than half the votes.
“I made the decision to significantly increase our investments,” Zuckerberg wrote in a memo to staff last week. “I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.”
The speed of the lay-offs by these global companies has also crashed into the spirit of employment law in the UK and Europe.
For employees, the experience underlines the fact that benevolent dictatorships can seem fine until they’re not so benevolent any more
“In many countries around Europe, you need to give warnings to public administrations or works councils or trade unions, even if the company is not unionised, you have to have a plan that mitigates the social impact of your choices,” says Valerio De Stefano, a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto.
The idea of these laws is not to prevent companies from making lay-offs, he says, but to make sure they happen fairly and with due warning. “We have a very rude awakening now, it is happening without any control or consultation, just someone who says: ‘Sorry, it’s my fault’.”
For employees, the experience underlines the fact that benevolent dictatorships can seem fine until they’re not so benevolent any more. Even people who have kept their jobs are seeing some benefits change.
At Twitter, Musk has announced that everyone must work at least 40 hours in the office, upending life for people who had planned on remote work.
Trade unions hope the lay-offs will help them to make the argument that unions are not just about trying to improve poor working conditions, but also about having a real voice and a seat at the table.
Mike Clancy, the general secretary of UK union Prospect, says the union has some members at Twitter and hopes to recruit more in the tech sector. “There’s often a progressive veneer – we’re all techies together,” he says. “[The] whole ambience is one of ‘we offer a different employment proposition’ – no, you don’t when it comes to jettisoning labour, do you?”
The other lesson is not to get too carried away with self-regarding language about the “war for talent”, which was ubiquitous in the tech sector until recently.
There are talented people in all walks of life. What matters for pay is supply and demand. Low-paid workers in the US have been getting big pay rises in nominal terms this year. No one is calling that a “war for talent”; they are calling it a “labour shortage”.
Tech companies might have offered amazing perks, but people don’t need dream jobs as much as they need jobs that treat them decently. The thing about dreams is that they disappear when you wake up.
– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2022 |
| The Financial Collapse of 2001 Unwinding | Stock Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read |
|
To: DinoNavarre who wrote (9921) | 11/16/2022 3:56:29 AM | From: elmatador | | | Europe Economy: They will only cut men's hair. Salon for the ladies. Change oil of cars. Produce tofu for the vegans Produce cucumbers and carrots in greenhouses That is going to be their economies. |
| The Financial Collapse of 2001 Unwinding | Stock Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last ReadRead Replies (2) |
|
To: DinoNavarre who wrote (9921) | 11/16/2022 5:18:45 AM | From: elmatador | | | Elon apologizes. But is not him worried about losing the engineers?
Let's check.
- 11,000 fired from Meta
- 10,000 fired from Amazon.
- And waiting for that big shoe to drop. Google.
- Should we tell those engineers that Who pays is who is in charge. Elon knows the pool of unemployed engineers is getting big and bigger:
|
| The Financial Collapse of 2001 Unwinding | Stock Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read |
|
| |