Amazon announced recently that it is shedding fourteen thousand corporate jobs. Various sources suggest that the number may reach thirty thousand in total, in which case it would top the twenty-seven thousand laid off in 2022–23.
Two WARN notices, the state-level public filings about closures and mass layoffs, were issued on October 28. One was for Washington, where the company announced layoffs for 2,303 employees by January 26. The other was for California, where Amazon announced 1,540 more. On the same day as the notices, Amazon alerted employees about its plan to “strengthen our culture and teams,” apparently by shrinking those teams.
Some outlets have taken this news, along with layoff announcements from Target, UPS, and others, as a sign that “AI has started to bite” or, as one writer put it in Jacobin, that the “robots are handing out pink slips.” Perhaps there will come a day when fashionable new tools displace labor en masse, but a closer look at the Amazon data casts doubt on this interpretation.
So if it’s not AI, what is it? One clarifying bit of data can be found in the position-level WARN notices that Washington and California mandate: not only do they reveal the location of the worksites where people are being laid off, but they also reveal the specific job titles that are being eliminated and in what number. I did a public records request to get this data, and I’ve included all of the recent notices that I got through that request here.
I also extracted the data from the PDFs and put up the numbers here. This allows you to see the full spread of positions eliminated. In Washington, 670 software development engineers lost their jobs (the largest category of job cuts), and in California, that number is 558. In total, a whopping 1,228 software development engineers were out of work in one day of layoffs.
The job cuts are not unique to one site or to one job category. Rather, what occurred was a trimming across many different…
Auteur: Benjamin Y. Fong
