Amazon has begun the largest wave of job cuts in the company’s history after announcing earlier this month that approximately 18,000 employees would be affected. CEO of Worldwide Amazon Stores Doug Herrington announced that affected employees would be notified via email and that the cause of the layoffs was a “wider effort to lower our cost to serve”.
“As we head into 2023, we remain in uncertain economic times. Therefore, we’ve determined that we need to take further steps to improve our cost structure so we can keep investing in the customer experience that attracts customers to Amazon and grows our business. Our plan to improve our cost structure will unfortunately include role reductions.”, said Herrington in the memo.
The announcement earlier this month came amid a wave of tech company layoffs as companies like Google, Meta, Salesforce and Microsoft have also recently announced job cuts.
Under the capitalist economic system, production is coordinated to maximize profits for the owners of the means of production: the capitalist class. The livelihoods of impacted workers are not the primary concern of the capitalists who refer to improvements in the “cost structure” which of course aligns with maximum profitability. As long as the capitalist system continues to exist, periodic crises of overproduction and unemployment will negatively affect the workers while the oligarchs continue to amass profits at their expense.
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