Amazon announced last week it would be cutting thousands of employees as part of an ongoing series of layoffs by the tech giant. The latest cuts will focus on its human resources division known as the People eXperience Technology team. Fifteen percent of a worldwide staff of 10,000, or approximately 1,500 employees, are being let go.
The move comes as Amazon seeks to lower costs while intensifying the hyper-exploitation of its remaining labor force. It also plans to spend upwards of $100 billion in the near future to rapidly expand its cloud and AI data centers. The company made profits of $59.2 billion last year and has a current market capitalization of $2.28 trillion, making it the fifth most valuable company in the world.
The company also credits the use of AI for the latest headcount reductions. “We expect that [AI] will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company,” said CEO Andy Jassy in June.
The latest job cutting follows the most extensive layoffs in the company’s 31-year history with 27,000 corporate employees cut in 2022 and 2023.
It also follows other, smaller reductions in force in 2025. Amazon shut down its Wondery podcast studio, resulting in a loss of 100 employees and also cut hundreds of jobs in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing unit in August. Approximately 100 jobs were also cut in its Goodreads book review site and Kindle units, along with an additional 100 cuts to its devices and services units in May. The latter units oversee development of a number of devices, including Echo speakers, Alexa voice assistants and Zoox self-driving cars.
The Amazon cuts are part of a global jobs bloodbath across the entire tech industry. The vast mountains of wealth accumulated by shareholders and tech CEOs based on speculative bubbles dwarfing those preceding the dot-com collapse and the 2008 housing crisis can only be maintained by an intensifying attack on the working class.
It is also no accident that leading tech industry figures, many of whom previously claimed to support greenhouse gas reduction and free speech, are now fully lining up behind the fascistic agenda of the Trump administration. President Trump’s September meeting with the heads of five of the six largest technology companies was notable not only for the latter’s praise of the would-be dictator’s plans to cut any and all remaining tech sector regulations. They also demonstrated their solidarity with the fascist president’s moves to suppress working class opposition through police state measures.
It is becoming clear that the recent round of tech layoffs is not part of a typical hiring boom-and-bust cycle. It is the result of a permanent restructuring process across the industry in which highly skilled workers, at least those who remain, will be facing ever greater exploitation and be forced to work even longer hours for even lower pay. The current job cutting process is underway while most large tech concerns are still experiencing massive increases in profits and stock valuations.
According to a recent article in TechCruch, more than 150,000 tech workers lost their jobs in 2024 and another 22,000 lost positions since the start of this year.
The latter includes:
355 Oracle workers in September at the company’s San Francisco and Seattle offices, which followed 101 job cuts at its Santa Clara, California location and 200 layoffs at its Pleasanton and Redwood City offices in the San Francisco Bay area earlier in the year. Oracle stock has risen 74.81 percent year to date as it moves to position itself as a key player in the growing AI infrastructure market.
221 positions at Cisco’s Milpitas, California and San Francisco offices as part of the networking giant’s long-term workforce-reduction strategy.
Chipmaker Intel plans to cut 2,400 Oregon-based workers on top of the 4,000 already laid off in July and 21,000 in April. The company let go a similarly staggering 15,000 workers last year.
Indeed and Glassdoor, both owned by parent company Recruit Holdings, announced they plan to eliminate approximately 1,300 jobs combined in the US, including in Human Resources, Research and Development and its sustainability teams.
On November 3, Salesforce will eliminate 262 jobs at its San Francisco headquarters, following a reduction of 93 workers in Washington state in September. CEO Marc Benioff made headlines earlier this month by recommending that the Trump administration send federal troops to San Francisco, sentiments which were echoed by Tesla/SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.
Facebook parent company Meta cut 5 percent of its 72,000 employees in January, as it courts favor with the Trump administration and prepares for an “intense year,” according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg with the company making massive investments in AI technology.
Also significant and not included in most reporting of the tech worker layoffs were government tech workers, many of whom played critical roles at Social Security and Medicare. Of the approximately 300,000 federal workers pushed out during Trump’s second term both before and after the government shutdown, thousands were undoubtedly tech workers. They are now facing the near impossibility of finding similar roles in the private sector.
Throughout 2025, US companies have thus far issued 2,745 WARN notices affecting 216,545 employees. WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notifications) are required by law whenever companies with more than 100 employees terminate the employment of 50 or more employees within a 30-day period. Federal government layoffs are exempt from the WARN Act.
The mass layoffs, tantamount to an open declaration of war against the working class, have hardly evoked a murmur of protest from the trade union bureaucracies, which have opposed any mass strike action. Instead, labor officials, including in the federal government unions, have carried out impotent court appeals and proposed letter writing and phone campaigns to Democratic Party politicians.
Workers at Amazon conducted a powerful strike at warehouses across the US late last year before it was called off by the Teamsters union without any of the workers’ demands being met. Instead, Amazon logistics workers have been compelled to work under the same oppressive conditions of low pay and benefits and punitive evaluation systems that they endured before the strike started. This will intensify over the coming Christmas holiday season as desperate seasonal workers are brought on board.
As the second “No Kings” protests demonstrated over the weekend, there is massive opposition to this state of affairs. It is becoming clear to masses of workers that Trump is only the administrator in charge of the ruling oligarchy’s plans to reduce hundreds of millions of workers to extreme poverty.
Workers must respond to the capitalist class’s declaration of war on them by declaring war on the capitalist class. This requires the formation of rank-and-file committees, independent from the trade union bureaucracy, to fight for the right to secure, good-paying jobs for all workers. The advancements in microtechnologies, automation and Artificial Intelligence must be used to shorten the workweek and increase living standards and used to advance healthcare, scientific research and other social improvements rather than the profit interests of a tiny minority of billionaires. This requires the transformation of the tech industry into a public utility collectively owned and democratically controlled by the working class.