Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses in corporate division

> These aren't "job losses", these are "firings".

While both terms mean someone no longer has a job, they differ in cause and implication.

Firing is when employer terminates someone for cause, i.e. employee did something wrong or didn't meet expectations. Job loss is a broader term, simply means the person no longer has a job, for any reason, but typically layoffs, downsizing, restructuring, plant closure, or being fired.

So I'm not really upset about saying job losses in this case rather than firing, because the employees who lost their jobs didn't do anything wrong and I think it is useful to be able to distinguish.

The phrase that DOES irk me is "let go" vs. "fire". Now that is a weasel phrasing.

"job losses" is BBC editorializing. They do not use that term in their letter: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-workfor...

I was just thinking the same, this is quite the weasel wording. Not only the “losses” but the passive voice. As if Amazon is a person who walked to work one day and realise it has a hole in its pocket from which thousands of jobs fell off. “Oh well, these things happen, not my fault and nothing I can do about it”, Amazon says as it shrugs its shoulders and whistles down the factory floor with a skip in its step.

There's an interesting asymmetry in language in this area.

Jobs are "created" by a company or an industry.

But they never seem to be "destroyed", instead they are "lost".

If the company starts hiring again, they're "creating" new jobs, not "finding" the ones they were careless enough to lose.

> These aren't "job losses", these are "firings". They aren't unfortunate accidents of external origin that happened to them, they are conscious internal decisions to let people go.

This. They also make it their point to send the message this particlar firing round is completely arbitrary and based on a vague hope that they somehow can automate their way out of the expected productivity hit, and that they enforce this cut in spite of stronger sales.

"Letting go" belongs in the same HR phrasebook. They didn't ask permission to quit and the company were so generous to let them, the initiative was from the other side.

It's a loss for the one being fired.

They just have to look harder and they'll find those jobs they lost.

This is a great tactic, where competent, good workers find a more stable job, and the ones unable to get a better job are then rehired. On one hand, you can bully them more, and they'll stay, on the other hand, they're so bad at their job, no one else wants them either.

I was not aware of this term before.

For others: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/jeff-bezos-day-1-versus-2-com...

I'm not really sure how this fits with Amazon's corporate culture. I thought all of the dead wood good pip'ed out of there on an ongoing basis.

If people are surviving that then who are are the people being ejected? Unprofitable areas or new products which didn't pan out?

Or they know something that the current Administration does not (or is withholding)? Maybe it's time to buckle up for a coming economic storm.

I've taken pay cuts twice in my career, but both times it was at unfunded startups and it was more of a "we'll get you back for this later" (one did, one did not).

I worry that normalizing the idea that a company can make you an offer (that you can't refuse) of lower pay, with the alternative being that you get fired, would set some really bad precedents.

Companies would start to min/max this process and would use it as a way to meet targets (perhaps unrealistic ones) at the expense of take-home pay for employees, even in situations where they don't actually need to make cuts.

Spreadsheet doesn’t like that option because number go down more with this option

> I wish employees would instead have an opportunity to sign up for lower salary.

They do, almost every year when health insurance premiums/deductibles/out of pocket maximum go up and number of in network or tier 1 providers goes down.

The instant that offer was made, any sensible person will start looking for another job. The only people who will stay are the ones who can’t get hired elsewhere. You’ll lose your best people and keep the worst.

Layoffs are very tricky because just the act of laying people off can trigger good employees who remain to start looking elsewhere. It can trigger a sort of evaporative cooling of your whole workforce. A strategy of offering reduced pay instead of being laid off would exacerbate it.

I wish the average and median salary of every position at the company was legally required to be made available to every employee and candidate so the negotiation can be an actual negotiation instead of a guessing game.

I wish workers voted for their managers and did so periodically, managers at the end of their term would return to their previous position if any. In fact, an expectation of every position being temporary could lead to exactly what you are describing.

But only if pay cuts hit everyone at the company equally or based on their merit, not the top layer deciding the bottom layer gets paid less, while giving themselves bonuses for saving the company money.

This is a lot. If you are in a company large enough, you surely know at least 20 people and one of them is gone. The earlier floated figure was even larger: 30K

Let them prove that this is not a big deal, but also take note that this is going to continue.

It sounds like the first step in desensitizing folks about firings and forcing the remaining people to work in fear. That’s what they want, they said it themselves, they want people to work in fear.

Not catastrophic, but probably a sign that jobs are shrinking instead of growing and so good market information if you were thinking about getting promoted or moving around?

We all know that this is just the beginning to get us desensitized.

The leaked plan is to fire up to 600,000 people. So roughly up to 40% of their workforce.

[dead]

Google tried this and gave up, as it didn’t work out[1].

For now, there’s a lot of focus on automating software dev jobs, but I think companies are just starting to realize automation will thin the management layers as well.

[1] https://www.inc.com/michael-schneider/google-didnt-always-ap...

Worse, we’ve been in one but have been pretending we aren’t. Stock goes up.

The middle? Oh we are just starting....

Well, it may be - hidden, at least in the US, by the "AI"-Bubble. But also an interesting point is that these layoffs do not happen in struggling companies -they all have increasing profits.

It is most likely a way to squeeze out some easy penny and pump up share prices - remember the "shareholder value". Shareholders today are all looking for pump & dump schemes.

"At the end of July, Amazon reported second quarter results which beat Wall Street expectations on several counts, including a 13% year over year increase in sales to $167.7bn (£125bn)."

The stock-owning class is in a boom. The working class is in a recession.

(People who have stock-market investments and need to work for a living are somewhere in between.)

The average of one billionaire gaining £10M and a hundred middle-class folks losing £100k is solidly positive, so this looks like a "growing economy" to many of the usual metrics.

I am not sure whether the people who are benefiting from all this have noticed how often this sort of dynamic in the past has led to torches and pitchforks and the like.

We already were in one. You just waited until someone else told you it was too late.

We are…

Recession is a term with a very defined meaning and that meaning does not include employment at all.

I think we’re reaching the limits of what “more” can achieve esp. at Amazon’s scale. At some point, we will run out of people to sell things to. Then you look for low hanging “fruits” like this (cutting costs) instead of innovating and creating newer things (selling more).

Also with less need for hiring and fewer people to manage - there’s an opportunity for companies to make their HR leaner.

> Reuters said the job cuts would affect Amazon's HR and devices teams.

I'm sure for some roles this works out. Software development has been doing it for decades: developers get better tools that make them more productive, this lowers costs, and at the lower price point there is a lot more demand for more and better software. Classic induced demand. But how much elastic demand is there for accounting or logistics?