Online retailer Amazon has informed the Department of Enterprise it plans to cut jobs at its Irish operation, as the ecommerce giant moves to cut thousands of jobs worldwide.
“The Minister for Enterprise, Tourism and Employment today received a notification of proposed collective redundancies from Amazon Ireland,” the department said in a statement. “In response to global challenges, a number of companies have announced reductions in overall staffing numbers recently and there can be an effect on Irish operations.”
Companies planning more than 30 redundancies at one time in Ireland are required to inform the Government of their plans in advance of any cuts.
Amazon has more than 6,000 staff in Ireland and it is understood the latest round of redundancies could affect between 300 and 325 people here.
The move came after Amazon announced plans to cut about 16,000 corporate employees globally, ratcheting up efforts to streamline bureaucracy amid rising competition over artificial intelligence.
The company will offer US-based employees 90 days to search for a new role internally, as well as severance and other transition support, Beth Galetti, senior vice-president of people, experience and technology at Amazon, said on Wednesday in a blog post.
“We’ve been working to strengthen our organisation by reducing layers, increasing ownership and removing bureaucracy,” Galetti said.
This is the second significant round of job cuts at Amazon recently.
Last October, Amazon initiated a big round of job cuts, removing 14,000 corporate roles and gutting its video games division. At the time, Amazon signalled that more cuts could come in 2026 as it found “additional places we can remove layers”.
Combined, the total number of terminations echoes the rolling lay-offs Amazon instituted in late 2022 and early 2023 that ultimately affected about 27,000 people.
Chief executive Andy Jassy has repeatedly said he is determined to cut management layers and ease bureaucracy that began to concern executives after a pandemic-era hiring binge. Last year, he also warned employees that AI will shrink the workforce as Amazon automates more of its operations.
The company employed a total of about 1.57 million people as of September 30th. Most of them work in warehouses. The corporate workforce comprises about 350,000 personnel, meaning the latest cuts represent about 4.6 per cent of that headcount.
Earlier, employees who had been anticipating lay-offs received a meeting invite and email from a top executive that was sent prematurely.
The email from Amazon senior vice-president Colleen Aubrey scheduled a meeting for Wednesday morning that has since been cancelled, titled “Project Dawn”.
The email said “impacted colleagues” based in the US, Canada and Costa Rica had been notified, and referred to a separate message from Amazon’s human resources chief Beth Galetti that does not appear to have been sent.
“Changes like this are hard on everyone,” the email from Ms Aubrey stated. “The decisions are difficult and made thoughtfully as we position our organisation and AWS for future success.”
Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the email.
The email quickly spread on internal message boards and social media sites like Reddit, where Amazon employees are sharing any hints they can glean about the scope of lay-offs. – Additional reporting by Bloomberg
