What It Means for Workers

Amazon has expressed plans to layoff 30,000 of its permanent employees, while hinting at hiring seasonal workers for the forthcoming holiday season. That means no benefits that come with full time employment but with the same amount of labour and responsibility. It shows that companies do not see workers as people to invest in, but as a cost to raise or cut depending on the season.

The company that built its empire on constant growth is now trimming off people like spreadsheet adjustments. This should also serve as a sobering call to professionals around the globe who think that employment in a giant corporation automatically renders “Job Security”. 

Pandemic Profit Hangover

The company labels this move as a correction of their “Excessive hiring” during the pandemic. But that is flipping the narrative. The company didn’t hire too much to favour all of those out of job labours during covid-19. They sure spiked their hiring but they did so to cater to those on record lockdown demand of their services. As these delivery services saw the highest peak during those days of lock down and pandemic, it’s fair to say that the crisis of the entire world was an opportunity for delivery services providers like Amazon.

This narrative of “too much hiring” doesn’t stand when you see that recently, they have also planned to cut off 15% of their HR professionals, replacing them with AI systems. This means that current layoffs are nothing but just a part of Big-tech’s normal cycle of expansion, extraction, and elimination, turning crisis-driven hiring into another form of short-term exploitation. 

Disposable By Design

Amazon is encouraging a gig-based economy, where workers work on daily wages, hourly rates, and seasonal commitments without any stability, social-security benefits, medical assistance, or future prospects.

The plan to hire 250,000 temporary workers shows that companies divide their staff into categories of cheap, replaceable labor and costly staff it can cut when profits dip. This isn’t about efficiency or anything, it’s simply about assembling an army of workers that can shrink and swell on demand, without requiring any real employment benefits while accepting full responsibility. 

The Theatrics of Efficiency

No one in the history of English language would have mis-used or over-used the word “Efficiency” as the giant corporations have used to justify their inconsiderate acts towards their workforce. Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, says that layoffs are about “cutting bureaucracy” and “making the company faster”.

That’s just corporate spin. The real goal is to save money by cutting people. The corporate systems of flagging “inefficiency” turns workers into informants creating fear instead of real improvements. The “efficiency” drive isn’t about streaming operations, it’s about engineering compliance and control while converting human cost into a quarterly win for the investors. 

Amazon’s simultaneous 30,000 corporate layoffs and hiring of 250,000 seasonal workers highlights how corporate employment now mirrors the gig economy at scale. Even the so-called “Permanent” roles are effectively temporary, as they could be cut whenever the company’s quarterly financial models demand. Modern corporations treat all employees as disposable, regardless of their tenure or performance.