Amazon's Layoffs Are Business as Usual, Not Omens of AI Doom (jacobin.com)

Amazon announced another round of corporate cuts — roughly 14,000 jobs so far, with some reports projecting up to 30,000 — and filed WARN notices on Oct. 28 for 2,303 layoffs in Washington and 1,540 in California. Public-records extractions of the state-level WARN data show the cuts are broad and distributed across many teams rather than concentrated in a single function: 670 software development engineers (SDEs) were included in the Washington notices and 558 in California, totaling 1,228 SDEs in a single day. That pattern, plus Amazon’s framing of the moves as culture- and “team-strengthening,” points to tactical trimming across groups rather than a single technological shock. Analysts caution that while AI-driven displacement remains a looming risk, this round looks more like typical Amazon “day-one” workforce management than an outright robot takeover. A deeper signal comes from H‑1B visa records. Amazon is the largest H‑1B user (13,265 FY2025 approvals so far) and likely employs ~33,800 H‑1B workers (~11% of corporate staff). Matching LCA and I-129 timelines to prior 2022–23 WARN data in California found 508 new H‑1B starts in Oct. 2022 followed by 767 corporate layoffs Nov–Jan, and nearly identical SDE-level swaps (≈295 H‑1B SDE starts vs. 274 SDE layoffs). While this doesn’t prove causation, it shows the H‑1B pipeline can readily replenish roles and may enable replacements; the pattern warrants further study and scrutiny of visa-driven labor dynamics even as the AI-displacement story remains speculative.