According to Washington Post, the e-commerce company Amazon employees are planning for a walkout in Seattle on May 31 in protest of layoffs.
A Los Angeles-based Amazon employee who plans to participate said, “Morale feels like it’s at an all-time low.”
“In meetings and one-on-ones with colleagues, there’s so much uncertainty and lack of clarity from leadership. … It’s an unsettling time to work at Amazon”, the employee added.
The purpose of the walkout is to focus on hiring freezes following mass layoffs due to a potential recession. The walkout that is organized will have 1,000 Seattle-based participants.
Even recently, Amazon is laying off about 500 employees in India. The company will lay off across different businesses and functions including Amazon Web Services (AWS), human resources, and support functions.
Earlier, CEO Andy Jassy said, “Someone may ask why we didn’t announce these 9,000 role reductions with the ones we announced a couple of months ago.”
“As our internal businesses evaluated what customers most care about, they made re-prioritization decisions that sometimes led to role reductions, sometimes led to moving people from one initiative to another, and sometimes led to new openings where we don’t have the right skills match from our existing team members”, he said.
He further added, “This initially led us to eliminate 18,000 positions (which we shared in January); and, as we completed the second phase of our planning this month, it led us to these additional 9,000 role reductions (though you will see limited hiring in some of our businesses in strategic areas where we’ve prioritized allocating more resources).”
However, companies have laid off employees but CEOs have a huge salary. Apparently, Facebook and Instagram’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn’t get a pay raise or receive a bonus last year, but he did receive more than $27 million in compensation due to the increased use of private aircraft.
On the other hand, Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s annual compensation soared to about $226 million in 2022, more than 800 times the median employee’s pay, the company said in a securities filing last month. However, both companies have laid off employees.
