Amazon has started the year with a series of layoffs across different parts of the company as it continues to trim its workforce and streamline operations.
On Wednesday, Amazon said it was laying off dozens of employees in its communications and corporate responsibility department, which includes its sustainability team.
The announcement comes shortly after Amazon cut 200 people from its stores division, the part of the business responsible for Amazon’s online marketplace.
Separately, Amazon said earlier this month it would close all seven of its warehouses in the Canadian province of Quebec, resulting in 1,700 employees losing their jobs.
Wednesday’s cuts are part of Amazon’s efforts to streamline its operations.
“We regularly review our organization’s structures to ensure we’re best set up to innovate and deliver results efficiently,” Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser said. “Following a recent review, we’re making some changes to the Communications and Corporate Responsibility organization to help us move faster, increase ownership, strengthen our culture and bring teams closer to customers.”
Amazon did not specify how many employees were laid off and did not provide a breakdown of how the cuts impacted the teams under the communications and corporate responsibility umbrella.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has worked to trim head count and streamline operations throughout his nearly four years at the helm. The deepest cuts came in 2022 and 2023, when Amazon laid off at least 27,000 employees across its divisions. Since then, it has made smaller cuts across pockets of the company.
In September, Jassy said the company was working to be less bureaucratic and issued a directive that all teams should reduce the number of managers compared to individual contributors. Doing so, he said, would reduce unnecessary layers that were slowing down innovation and keeping employees further away from the work they were doing.
“As we have grown our teams as quickly and substantially as we have the last many years, we have understandably added a lot of managers,” Jassy wrote. “In that process, we have also added more layers than before. It’s created artifacts that we’d like to change.”
In that September announcement, Jassy told employees they would be expected to work from the office five days a week, a change from the three-day mandate that had been in place since May 2023.
Some employees speculated that the new mandate that took effect earlier this month was another way to trim head count by encouraging some employees to quit rather than forcing layoffs. Amazon has denied that allegation.
As part of its efforts to streamline operations, the communications and corporate responsibility team is also asking some employees to relocate, Glasser said. Those employees will receive relocation support. Employees who are laid off will receive pay and benefits for 60 days, as well as severance.
