Amazon automation drive

Amazon currently employs 1 560 000 people globally. It has hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers, an army of contract drivers and layers of managers to hire, monitor and supervise employees.

Their US work force has more than tripled since 2018, but two recent announcements suggest that growth is about to slow rapidly.

First, the New York Times reported that Amazon hopes to replace more than 500 000 low-end jobs with robots. Their automation team says it can avoid hiring more than 160 000 people in the US it would otherwise need by 2027, and save about 30 cents on each item that Amazon picks, packs and delivers to customers.

The jobs being phased out are at the lowest rung, in noisy, unpleasant facilities, and are physically challenging and repetitive. The cuts are part of an ongoing effort to correct an aggressive hiring spree during the Covid pandemic, when Amazon doubled its warehouse network over a two-year period.

Second, in overnight news, Amazon said it will cut up to 30 000 corporate jobs, roughly 10% of its white-collar workforce, starting today. Pink slips will go out to managers in its human resources, cloud computing, advertising and other business units.

We are shareholders in Amazon, so we applaud these developments. CEO Andy Jassy is to be commended for driving AI adoption, efficiency and superior profit margins.