Amazon is on a different employment plane, with most of its workforce labouring not at computers but in warehouses, supermarkets and other elements of what the company calls “field and customer support”. It added 810,000 employees from 2019 to 2021, more than doubling its headcount, and employs more people than any US corporation other than Walmart.
Amazon has announced 18,000 layoffs so far this fall and winter, the most of any tech company but only 2.2 per cent of its 2019 to 2021 headcount increase.
The company did shed 99,000 employees in the second quarter of 2022 through what it said was mainly attrition of warehouse and logistics workers but added 21,000 in the third quarter. (Amazon includes employee counts in its quarterly earnings releases; most companies only report the number once a year in their 10-K annual report.)
The current 2022 to 2023 tech layoff total as tallied by Layoffs.fyi, which includes companies in retail, finance, health care and crypto, is 219,132, of which 59,448 have been announced this year. Meanwhile, US employers overall added 4.5 million jobs in 2022, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), with no real sign of a slowdown in the December jobs numbers.
Full December numbers aren’t available yet for the industry categories that cover most or all of what Microsoft, Alphabet, Salesforce and Meta do, but these three sectors added 117,000 employees over the first 11 months of the year, more than they added in 2020 or 2021.
The BLS tries to sort payroll jobs data by “establishment” rather than company, so the employees of Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud-computing subsidiary, should in theory be counted as well.
This hiring boom has been going on for a while, but it accelerated over the past three years.
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