Amazon reportedly set to slash 10K jobs
Unclear what impact cuts to tech, corporate workforce will have on Conn. plans
Amazon is reportedly set to slash 10,000 jobs from its huge worldwide workforce, with some of the jobs cuts coming as early as this week, according to published reports on Monday.
The New York Times, citing unidentified sources within the company, reported the job cuts will come from three different areas within the Seattle-based technology company: The devices division, which includes the Alexa voice assistant, as well as the human resources department and retail division.
Jobs that would be cut, according to the Times report, include technology and corporate jobs from within those three Amazon divisions. Company officials did not respond to a Hearst Connecticut Media request for comment Monday on the layoffs, including whether any of the company’s employees in the state would lose their jobs.
This is not Amazon’s first round of large scale layoffs this year, according to Tuvana Rua, an associate professor of management at Quinnipiac University’s School of Business. Rua said over the summer, the company announced it was laying off 99,000 front-line workers.
“Their earnings aren’t where they want them to be and with inflation, they want to pause and see where the economy goes,” she said. “They hired for the capacity that they needed at the time (when the pandemic started) and now they don’t need as many people.”
Amazon employs more than 1.5 million people worldwide.
Like many technology companies, Amazon ramped up hiring to meet the demand created during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. As public health restrictions eased and consumers became more comfortable going into bricks and mortar stores, the demand for online shopping options has eased somewhat, Rua said.
As of August 2020, Amazon had more than 3 million square feet of distribupears
tion space in 10 communities across Connecticut, company officials said earlier this year.
Since the middle of the past decade, Connecticut has seen Amazon distribution warehouses — which Amazon officials call “fulfillment and “sortation”centers — open up all over the state. In the New Haven area alone, it has fulfillment centers in Orange, North Haven and Wallingford.
The company announced in January it was planning to develop another distribution facility in the Naugatuck Valley on a 150-acre site that straddles the Waterbury-Naugatuck border. State officials have said they expect the facility, if it is built, would create 1,000 jobs.
Rua said she expects Amazon could also put developing new warehouses
on hold. Waterbury officials were not immediately available for comment Monday regarding the status of the warehouse project.
Amazon announced in late August that it was closing five warehouses in Massachusetts.
Rua said Amazon might also put the expansion of its Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh supermarket locations on hold as company officials plan their next move. Or they could close under-performing locations of those stores that are already in existence, she said.
There are 10 Whole Foods stores in Connecticut and earlier this year, plans for a location in Old Saybrook were announced.
There are currently no Amazon Fresh locations in Connecticut, although one location in Brookfield apfrom the outside to be complete. And although Amazon Fresh officials have not confirmed it, there are indications plans in the works to open stores in Westport and Orange.
Wallingford is one of several Connecticut towns that has benefited from Amazon’s expansion of its distribution network. The town has two distribution centers: One on Cherry Street in the southern end of town and the other on Research Parkway, near the Meriden border.
Joe Mirra, chairman of Wallingford’s economic development commission, said he recently received an e-mail from company officials that said Amazon was looking to hire more people at the two distribution facilities. Mirra said if the layoffs trickle down to the local level “it will have an impact on places like gas stations and supermarkets, anywhere people spend money on basics.”
“If that comes to fruition, we have a mechanism in place to retrain them,” he said of any local Amazon workers who might lose their jobs. “There are plenty of jobs out there for them.”
But Mirra said the timing of the layoffs seems odd.
“You’re running into what is a very big season for them,” he said.
Rua said the layoffs could create ill will toward the company both with consumers and workers it might seek to hire in the future.
“Not all of the tech companies are handling layoffs in a humane way,” she said.