Amazon job cuts: Read the memos (opens in new tab)

Unionization is the correct response here. The incentives of company leaders simply don't account for workers' desire to not lose their jobs. The only way to change this is for workers to change said incentives--by organizing. Of course, easy for me to say as a freelancer. I'm definitely not trying to say unionizing tech would be easy. But it certainly is simple, at least conceptually.

Do you think these people would have been better off if tech had carried net fewer heads the past couple of years? Having an extra 100k employed for two years is worse than those jobs just never existing?

>I'm not seeing a clear solution for this culture of toying with thousands of peoples' lives for a quick buck

A bit over-dramatic, no? Nothing to say about the employees who left their companies for Google to "make a quick buck"?

Business expand and contract. Should Google be considered a retirement home? The people who took these jobs are smart men and women who will go on to work at other companies. This isn't new.

How do mass layoffs work in places like the EU?

I know it's much more difficult to fire people in the EU, but is there an exception if it's done as part of a layoff?

The only real solution I can think of is regulatory in nature (e.g. requiring paying out 6 months pay during a layoff, which might make companies think twice before "hiring ahead of growth")

Because let's face it, "hiring ahead of growth" is the real problem. These companies aren't firing people because they are making less money. They're firing people because they hired people before they actually needed them, in anticipation of future growth that didn't materialize.

Is this actually bad? Would it be better for those 18k jobs to never have been available at all?

> Why unions are a political matter is beyond me;

My take is because unions facilitate less profit for C-levels, who then buy/rent lobbyists to bribe, errr, "persuade" politicians to enact laws or regulations or whatever to keep unions out.

Your comment made me wonder something i don’t remember being discussed in these terms, but what about our markets and laws makes liquidity in employers and employees work poorly?

What I'd like to know is what were the leaderships (Google, Amazon, et al) thinking or expecting when they decided to mass hire.

It'd be neat to have a list of companies that use this strategy. It seems like all the big ones do?

There's no solution because, from society's perspective, there's no problem.

The whole idea of capitalism involves competition and consistent growth, right? In any human society, that leads inevitably to war and conquest. It also means exploiting whatever resources are available, including human resources. Back in the day it was using colonial slaves to cheaply mine resources, deforesting for fuel/ships/etc, or hunting animals to extinction (food, oil, pelts, etc). Today it's using cheap labor in 3rd world countries, dumping chemicals in rivers, deforesting rainforest for cattle pasture. And when a competitor (foreign empire or corporation) threatens you, you basically work to either destroy or own the competition and their citizens/customers (although you might also simply make a backroom deal for peace). All for the wealth and glory of a corporation/CEO/board/Emperor/nation.

Our companies are just acting as the new empires of global society. Have been for nearly a century, when the old empires began to crumble. Same humans, different maps & hats.

It's always been a big game of follow the leader, one tech company lays off 5000 workers then a next company lays off 5000 workers because if it's good for company A it must be good for company B. It's no different than when Yahoo told all their workers they had to come into the office and all the tech companies tried to drag their workers back into the office, they just didn't want to miss the trend. In a year everyone will be hiring again and companies will be screaming about needing more skilled (and cheaper) workers but for now it's just the semi-annual culling of the herd.

That's an interesting point of view. It would make economical sense for big corps to act as a labor market cartel, and the fact that they are all laying off together is a suspicious coincidence.

> the best moment to invest is during a crisis

Are we at the beginning, middle or end of it? Investing broadly at the beginning of a crisis that has the signs of being deep is less advised.

> compensation of the workforce in check

This is the real take away, imo. It seems like a controlled, insider effort to combat wage growth.

I essentially didn’t get a pay raise after a year of stellar performance reviews because of inflation, and with these layoffs I’m no longer in a position of bargaining power to ask for more.

That's a bingo!

It’s not clear actually. I know some friends who are affected in Nov and some are affected yesterday.

This article was late to the game therefore headline is garbage. Amazon laid off 18k ppl in the most clusterfuck way. They had an article leaked about the wave 1 in November that impacted some 8k to 11k and then this weds the total was brought up to 18k. The emails from the article were sent to Amazon employees on weds the 18th after Amazon employees spent all of the holidays and January stressed wondering "am I going to be laid off?"

No new layoffs, but the 18k is the collective total and it's being spread out so long because of Amazon leadership incompetence and world wide labor laws differing.

Inflation hurts the common folk as well though (people who own assets have their assets stay the same in real value, people who don't have the spending power of their bank accounts eroded).

What you're theorizing might still be happening (inflation looks like it's been controlled for the last few months, but layoffs continue), but lowering inflation is more than PR.

To be fair, inflation numbers are going back down in the US, while countries that aren't raising their interest rates (or at least not as aggressively as the US is) still have much higher inflation, double digits in some cases. So it does seem to be working, as shitty as it is.

I don't think all these companies really need to lay people off though, they're just using 'everyone else is doing it' as an excuse to get away with it and juice up their stock price.

There is an excellent interview with Clara Mattei on The Majority Report, about her book The Capital Order. She has a similar point, historically supported.

Contract jobs are never part of layoffs.

OTOH, not all full time roles have an actual human assigned. They could also be budgeted for, but not filled yet. Post 2008, managers usually kept a couple of unfilled roles for events like this.

Interesting take. Can we consider contract labor a “layoff”? Wouldn’t they try to “look better” (like they are not laying off) by not considering “closed contract” not the same as “layoff”?

Wouldn’t the contracted firm be doing the layoff not the tech comp?

Interesting take!

Came here to say this myself, for F’s sake.

Amazon owns multiple grocery chains!

Not really, unemployment rates are at 20 year lows