Amazon Slated to Cut 30K Jobs, Looking to Replace Hundreds of Thousands With Robots

Amazon Slated to Cut 30K Jobs, Looking to Replace Hundreds of Thousands With Robots

Amazon.com plans to lay off as many as 30,000 employees starting as early as Tuesday, according to the Wall St. Journal, which spoke to people familiar with the matter. And this may be just the beginning.

According to WSJ:

The job cuts, which won’t all happen this week, would amount to roughly 10% of the online giant’s corporate workforce, the people said.

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Thousands of corporate pink slips are expected to go out Tuesday, cutting across the organization and hitting human resources, cloud computing, advertising and a number of other business units, the people said. The total number of reductions hasn’t been finalized, one of the people said.

Amazon’s job cuts come as large companies in the U.S. are looking at ways to reduce or slow the growth of their head count, including by employing artificial intelligence. Rising prices, a tighter labor market and the ebb and flow of President Trump’s trade war have led corporate leaders to look at ways to tighten belts without hurting growth.

 

More Cuts Slated - Workers Replaced by Robotics

These cuts are not slated to impact the jobs in Rhode Island, but future changes may dramatically impact Rhode Island.

Amazon employs over 1,500 people at its Johnston fulfillment center, which opened in late 2024. This total represents full-time associates working in picking, packing, and shipping operations, as well as other support roles on-site.

It is not known if those jobs could be at risk in the near future.

 

Half a Million More Jobs Targeted

Amazon employs approximately 1.56 million people worldwide as of October 2025, including full-time and part-time workers across its global operations. The majority of the workforce is in warehouse, logistics, and fulfillment roles, with about 1.1 million U.S.-based employees and several hundred thousand international staff.

This corporate job slashing comes a week after the New York Times reported that Amazon plans to replace more than half a million jobs with robots.

“Internal documents show the company that changed how people shop has a far-reaching plan to automate 75 percent of its operations,” reported the Times.

"Executives told Amazon’s board last year that they hoped robotic automation would allow the company to continue to avoid adding to its U.S. work force in the coming years, even though they expect to sell twice as many products by 2033. That would translate to more than 600,000 people whom Amazon didn’t need to hire," added the Times.

Noted political scientist Darrell West of Brookings, in a column published in GoLocal in 2018, warned about the impact of lower-paying workers losing their jobs to robots.

"While some dispute the dire predictions on grounds new positions will be created to offset the job losses, the fact that all these major studies report significant workforce disruptions should be taken seriously. If the employment impact falls at the 38 percent mean of these forecasts, Western democracies likely could resort to authoritarianism as happened in some countries during the Great Depression of the 1930s in order to keep their restive populations in check," said West. 

"If that happened, wealthy elites would require armed guards, security details, and gated communities to protect themselves, as is the case in poor countries today with high-income inequality. The United States would look like Syria or Iraq, with armed bands of young men with few employment prospects other than war, violence, or theft," added West.