Amazon announced a second round of massive job cuts Friday as part of its earlier announced goal of laying off 30,000 corporate employees. The latest cuts will remove 14,000 white-collar jobs and will affect the company’s Amazon Web Services (AWS), retail, Prime Video and human resource units.

Plans to eliminate the 30,000 positions had been announced in October and were primarily attributed by management to advances in artificial intelligence software.

However, in a third quarter earnings call, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy shared that the cuts were “not really financially driven and it’s not even really AI-driven.” In other words, the company, which made $59.2 billion in 2024 net income and will likely exceed that figure this year, had already determined to destroy a considerable portion of its workforce and divert even greater sums into shareholders’ pockets regardless of financial conditions or advancements in technology.

Less than a week after the planned cuts in October, AWS, the world’s largest cloud computing provider, experienced its longest unplanned outage, bringing thousands of sites and applications down for several hours. AWS engineers had to correct an error made by an automated procedure to resolve the outage; however, Amazon is proceeding with the job cuts nonetheless.

The company is the world’s second-largest private employer after Walmart and has already planned to cut more than 500,000 employees overall within the next few years, which would represent approximately 33 percent of its global workforce and nearly 50 percent of its US-based workforce.

Other recently-announced white collar job cuts either announced or implemented this month include:

•  San Francisco-based design software creator Autodesk announced plans to eliminate roughly 7 percent of its 15,300 global employees, a cut of 1,000 positions.

•  1,000 to 1,500 employees were cut from Meta as part of its 2026 “year of efficiency” strategy. The job slashing represents between 10 to 15 percent of its Reality Labs division, responsible for Metaverse and related virtual reality technologies. They follow 4,000 company job cuts in 2025 representing 5 percent of its global workforce.

•  A thousand job cuts at Citigroup, with the banking giant promising an additional round of layoffs in March. These also follow significant 2025 job losses with Chief Financial Officer Mark Mason reporting a 2025 workforce reduction of 240,000 to 226,000 in a recent earnings call.

•  The virtual obliteration of online video platform Vimeo after its acquisition by Bending Spoons, a company specializing in hostile takeovers of smaller web applications. A few months after the acquisition, the entire video team was let go, putting in jeopardy the company’s vast archive of historical and independent films and short videos.

•  24,000 job cuts at Intel. Despite the AI boom and consequent rising demand for its chips, the company announced the massive cuts this month, which equal approximately 15 percent of its staff.

•  15,000 job cuts at tech giant Microsoft. The cuts played a significant part in panicked employees taking to social media warning of an additional pending job loss involving 22,000 employees this month. In a virtually unprecedented move, the company’s communications officer went on social media to refute the rumors as unfounded, although it is highly likely that the company will be announcing further cutbacks to its 210,000 person workforce later this year.

•  Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson announced a 1,600 person job cut on top of a 5,000 person head count reduction in 2025. The company is seeking to offset sluggish growth through layoffs and has also become involved in military defense projects for the first time in its history as a result of the Russia-Ukraine war, along with escalating tensions between Europe and the United States.

The response of the trade unions to this assault on the lives and conditions of its members and their families has been total silence. 

The Teamsters, which includes the fake rank-and-file Amazon Labor Union, have said nothing about the massive cuts at the company even though they were announced less than a year after strikes were called at several Amazon warehouses.

The 2024 strikes, which had been called by warehouse workers, delivery drivers and related logistics staff, were aimed at safer conditions, higher pay and an end to punitive surveillance. Workers voted overwhelmingly in favor of strike action and Amazon workers enjoyed support from workers throughout the world, with international Black Friday protests taking place among global Amazon workers.

The Teamsters feared above all else that the Amazon workers’ struggle could expand beyond their control and prevented genuine socialists from speaking with pickets while offering up speaking platforms to Democratic Party officials instead. The latter attempted to channel workers’ struggles into the dead end of “get out the vote” and congressional pressure campaigns.

It is critical for workers to recognize that a) there will no return to previous conditions. The “restructuring” plans of the tech and corporate oligarchs are exactly that; they include mass layoffs with no rehiring plans even in the distant future. And b) that the unions will do nothing to mobilize against this urgent state of affairs.

Even when faced with the cold-blooded murder of two workers in Minneapolis, the unions, including the Minnesota AFL-CIO, have defied calls to expand strike action beyond city borders despite the strivings of workers and young people to do precisely that. 

The only way to stop the massive jobs bloodletting—and literal bloodletting—is through the development of independent rank-and-file committees within Amazon and beyond. Lines of communication and coordination must be made with striking New York and California healthcare workers, teachers, public sector workers and others across all industries and professions. We encourage all workers to contact the World Socialist Web Site for information on both joining and forming rank-and-file committees here.