00:00 Speaker A
Amazon starts laying off employees. They’ve been announced before, but reports this morning say they’re starting. And this is mainly focused on enterprises, right? This isn’t a warehouse worker or anything like that.
00:15 Speaker B
No, these are white-collar jobs at Amazon. Uh, uh, the big thing is, you know, back in October, there were layoffs. Well, Reuters reported at the time that they were considering cutting 30,000 white-collar jobs. Uh, so now Reuters is reporting that, uh, uh, as early as next week, they will be making further cuts uh to get to that number. They have previously cut 14,000 positions. So, you know, they still have a long way to go before they can achieve that. Um, so we could see that as soon as next week. They report earnings on the fifth day. Uh, so we’ll probably see them make cuts and then give some kind of explanation as to where they relate or what the reasons for that are, uh, as part of the actual earnings call. The initial thought was that this was a result of artificial intelligence and then uh Andy Jassy, the CEO said on the earnings call, uh, not really, uh, basically saying, you know, uh, it’s not even necessarily about artificial intelligence but more of a cultural issue uh uh uh issue. Well, actually, you know, Silicon Valley has been talking about flattening, um, which is what they call firing middle managers. Well, they all basically came to the conclusion that there was too much bureaucracy within their companies. Things were moving so slowly, uh, they wanted to speed up the decision-making. Uh, they’re probably overhiring during the pandemic. That’s a lot of things. This is one of the things many companies do. Well, I think at that point they all thought that everyone was going to be remote forever. Um, so they hired uh and now they’re all realizing that they don’t necessarily need that many employees or they want to save uh, you know, on the bottom line, so that’s the point of these cuts, uh, you know, saving some money for these companies, uh, but, you know, at the expense of people’s jobs.