Amazon is laying off thousands of employees, but there are still plenty of people working there.
The 14,000 corporate workers being let go are about 0.9% of its roughly 1.6 million employees as of the end of last year. The Big Tech company expanded to over a million full-time and part-time employees in 2020, climbing to 1.6 million a year later when there was a lot of turnover in the overall US workforce as the economy reopened after the pandemic-induced recession.
Amazon's workforce has roughly tripled between 2017 and 2024.
Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology at Amazon, said in a message to workers on Tuesday that the new cuts "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."
Amazon is just one large company that's laying off workers. UPS said in its third-quarter earnings that it has cut thousands of roles in the first nine months of the year.
Ernie Tedeschi, a nonresident senior fellow at The Budget Lab at Yale, told Business Insider that AI is a plausible factor in the current spate of layoffs. However, he added that the elevated hiring a few years ago is likely the larger reason.
"I see this as mainly a correction to pandemic-era dynamics rather than some new thing like AI that's striking these companies," Tedeschi said.
During the Great Resignation and the hot labor market following the big post-COVID reopening, workers felt empowered to move around a lot. That also meant companies opening up roles and seeking new hires.
Tedeschi said companies were able to maintain their beefed-up workforce for a while, but can't continue to do so in a more uncertain period.
"The other shoe is dropping, and they have to cost optimize and let some of those people go," Tedeschi said.
Claudia Sahm, the chief economist for New Century Advisors, told Business Insider that the US is in a low-hire, low-fire job market, following a high-hire market with high quits just a few years ago.
"We've just had some pretty dramatic changes in the labor market in recent years," Sahm said.
Some of the laid-off Amazon workers could end up finding a new role at the company. Galetti said in the Tuesday message that the company is "offering most employees 90 days to look for a new role internally."
