Amazon UK staff are braced for bad news as the ecommerce and tech services giant announced it will make 14,000 redundancies globally in its latest round of cuts.
Amazon’s operations in the North include its corporate office in Manchester, development centre in Edinburgh and fulfilment centres scattered around the region including in Manchester, Bolton, St Helens, Warrington, Doncaster and the recently opened Hull site.
Specific details of the cuts are yet to be announced, with more expected later today, although the GMB Union, which represents many Amazon UK workers, described it as “almost inevitable” that many workers here will be affected.
The latest round of cuts follow on from Amazon’s largest ever cut of 18,000 roles in January 2023 when the consumer retail part of the business, including Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go, were scaled back. This was swiftly followed by the announcement of a further 9,000 lay offs in March.
Although the cuts are significant, they are not as bad as feared, with rumours swirling over the weekend and outlets including Reuters and the Wall Street Journal suggesting as many as 30,000 jobs could be on the line.
The job losses come despite Amazon posting £19.2bn profits in its most recent results, published in July. The firm is due to announce financial results for the third quarter of this year on Thursday evening, UK time.
In a message sent to staff, Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology, Beth Galetti, blamed the growth of artificial intelligence (AI) for the cuts: “Some may ask why we’re reducing roles when the company is performing well,” she wrote. “What we need to remember is that the world is changing quickly. This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before.”
The New York Times has reported that Amazon plans to replace more than half a million jobs with robots, automating 75% of its operations.
Amazon is also to some degree a victim of its own success during the pandemic, when the company undertook massive hiring sprees to cope with the increased demand for home deliveries during lockdown.
Galetti added that those who lose their job will be prioritised for openings within Amazon to help “as many people as possible” find new roles and that hiring will continue, despite the latest cull, in “key strategic areas” while the online retail behemoth finds additional places we can “remove layers, increase ownership, and realise efficiency gains.”
Andy Prendergast, national secretary of the GMB Union, claimed the cuts highlighted “everything that’s wrong” with Amazon’s model:
“Amazon cutting jobs while registering astronomical profits shows everything that’s wrong with the business,” he said in a statement. “Bezos can spend billions launching celebrities into space and takeover Venice for his wedding, but he can’t treat his loyal workforce with dignity. We will be supporting our members across Amazon as they face this uncertain future.”
