Amazon laid off workers eight months ago. Those workers remain unemployed. This constitutes news because apparently we've collectively forgotten how job markets work.
The headline promises burnout, frustration, and heartbreak. Three things you could experience watching your Robinhood portfolio or eating at Chipotle. But no, we're meant to believe getting fired from a company that makes you piss in bottles represents some unique form of suffering.
Here's what happened: Amazon decided it had too many employees. Amazon fired those employees. Other companies also decided they had too many employees. Now there are more people looking for jobs than jobs looking for people. Economists call this "a saturated labor market." Normal people call it "Tuesday."
The workers are frustrated. They send out resumes. They get rejected. They send out more resumes. They get rejected again. It's almost like they're experiencing the same job search process that's existed since someone invented the concept of employment, except now they can get rejected faster via email.
Eight-plus months is the critical detail here. Not eight months. Eight-plus. That plus is doing Olympic-level heavy lifting. It could mean nine months. It could mean eleven months. It could mean eight months and three days. The vagueness suggests someone started counting and then got too depressed to maintain accurate records.
Amazon called these its "most expansive job cuts ever." A phrase that sounds impressive until you remember Amazon's hiring practices previously resembled a Costco free sample table on Saturday afternoon. They'd hire anyone with a pulse and an email address. Cutting back to merely hiring tens of thousands of people instead of hundreds of thousands apparently qualifies as "expansive."
The real tragedy is these workers probably thought their AWS certification and two years of experience made them irreplaceable. Then Amazon replaced them with a pivot table and an intern.
Photo by Marques Thomas on Unsplash
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