Amazon on Tuesday informed 14,000 of their employees through an email sent at 3 a.m. that their services were no longer needed by the company.
And the company prepared the managers of the people that were leaving through training that was issued one day earlier.
A lot has been written lately about AI’s impact on layoffs at certain companies.
Stoking the fear through manipulative messaging, the key AI players, including Amazon, are using AI as the reason for layoffs.
Economists on the other hand who study the employment markets at a macro and micro level are less convinced.
The skepticism comes from the impact of outsize hiring by these same companies before, during and after the pandemic when it was a lot cheaper to borrow money at interest rates near zero.
And technology impacts from new innovation take years to accomplish what these companies are ascribing to AI in just a handful of months.
From the day OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, the impact of AI on the economy, jobs and people became part of the discussion.
Does it really matter the reason for the layoffs?
People that are intelligent, motivated and productive gave their all every day they logged in for Amazon.
And they are given notice, right before the holidays, via an email at an obscene time of day, that all of their work will now be accomplished by fewer people.
They were let go shortly after Amazon clamped down on their previously welcomed and encouraged work from home policy that allowed people to work from anywhere they chose.
A company that employs hundreds of thousands of people across the world is closely watched by many leaders in business.
How they treat employees can and will be used by others to manage their businesses, impacting culture across a wide swath of the world.
When we needed to hire you, we had all kinds of perks and treated people relatively well.
Now, we don’t need you or your hard work any longer, so here’s a pat on the back and good luck out there from an email in the teeth of what is an ugly job market.
Right before the holidays.
All pendulums, like economies, swing from good to bad and back. It is never in a straight predictable line. And individual companies have a myriad of reasons to end employment.
If they wish to hire people again–which they will–they would be smart to treat people with more class and basic dignity.
Unlike investors, former and future employees remember how you treated people at the best of times, and at the worst of times.
Leave a Reply