Amazon laid off 660 New York City-based workers in its massive round of job cuts last month, according to data from the state’s Department of Labor.
The affected workers came from nine different offices in Manhattan, including the Manhattan West location and the New York Tech Hub at the old Lord & Taylor building.
All of the layoffs are permanent.
Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology, said last month that the company was cutting thousands of corporate jobs to become more efficient while “shifting resources” to AI tools, which are “enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before.”
Last summer, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said generative AI would be used across the company and eventually reduce the need for so many corporate employees.
“As we roll out more generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” Jassy wrote in a memo to staff.
Workers who were laid off last month were given 90 days to find a new job within the company. Anyone unable to find a new role will receive severance and other benefits, such as job search assistance.
The layoffs came amid reports that Amazon, which currently employs around 1.2 million U.S. workers, has plans to replace more than half a million of those people with “cobots” — a term that implies robots collaborating with humans — and avoid hiring at least 160,000 human workers by 2027.
Amazon countered that claim by saying the money the company saves from automation will help to create new higher-paying jobs, such as positions for robotic technicians.
The company also said it was intending to hire 250,000 seasonal workers ahead of the holiday rush, including roughly 8,500 people in New York, according to the Democrat and Chronicle.
“The facts speak for themselves: No company has created more jobs in America over the past decade than Amazon,” a company spokesman told the Daily News last month.
