The announcement by tech and e-commerce giant Amazon to furlough 18,000 workers in the US will have to face a working-class counterattack to protect jobs and living standards.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who took over from billionaire Jeff Bezos in 2021, announced layoffs on Wednesday following leaks of internal employees. blamed an “uncertain economy” and rapid hiring during the pandemic as reasons for the layoffs.
Feigning sympathy for the affected workers, Jassy said: He added that the job cuts would allow the company to pursue “longer-term opportunities with a stronger cost structure.” In other words, corporate profits increase.
The Amazon job massacre is the latest in a brutal pushback by corporate and financial aristocrats against workers’ demands for better wages and working conditions, including at Amazon’s warehouses. One of the richest people on the planet, Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos’ net worth exceeds his $100 billion, even though workers are paying the price for the economic crisis. increase.
News of Amazon’s job cuts follows a series of mass layoffs at tech companies. TrueUp’s Tech His Layoffs According to his tracker, the tech company will lay off 1,517 people in 2022, with 237,874 jobs lost. This includes the tech giant his Meta, Netflix, and hundreds of tech startups. This is a staggering 1,800% increase in job cuts from 2021, when 13,000 jobs were cut. The biggest layoffs took place in November, including on Twitter where billionaire socialist Elon Musk brutally purged more than 70% of his employees.
In addition to the job carnage of the first week of 2023, Salesforce has announced that it will cut more than 10% of its workforce, or over 8,000 employees.
But the job carnage isn’t limited to the tech sector. The manufacturing industry is also in danger of layoffs. Multinational automaker Stellatis has announced that it may shut down several plants this year as part of a global consolidation of the auto industry. This week, Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares candidly said the company would cut costs to “absorb the additional costs of electrification,” adding that “if the market shrinks, we won’t need so many factories.” “I’ll have to make an unpopular decision,” he said ominously.
The carnage of developing jobs is part of a conscious policy by the ruling class led by the Biden administration. In response to inflation spikes over the past year, the US Federal Reserve and other international central banks have raised interest rates at the steepest pace since the early 1980s. The explicit aim is to promote unemployment in order to force a drastic cut in real wages.
Commenting on the recently released December employment report, which showed a “cooling down” in employment, new york times “The supply and demand mismatch continues to accelerate wage growth at a faster pace than the Fed would like, especially in service industries where compensation drives prices. The program is intended to cool the labor market and, with it, contain wage growth.”
of Times The Federal Reserve has outspokenly said it aims to raise the unemployment rate to a level where “about 1 million jobs will be lost.” That is, the Federal Reserve, acting on behalf of the financial aristocrats, seeks to cause social catastrophe in order to force workers to accept poverty-level wages.
In fact, the International Labor Organization (ILO) recently reported that real wages for workers in the United States and Canada fell by 3.2% in the first six months of 2022. For the ruling class, this is considered a good start. , but not enough.
The surge in inflation, which has had a devastating effect on the living conditions of workers around the world, is itself the result of more than a decade of free-money policies by the world’s central banks to fuel speculative mania in financial markets. It’s a product. This is exacerbated by the effects of the US and NATO proxy wars against Russia and the impact of the ruling class’ response to the pandemic to shifts in global supplies.
Interest rate hikes have particularly affected tech companies. Tech companies have relied on easy funding and Wall Street speculation to fuel their growth over the past decade. Major tech stocks and cryptocurrencies fell more than 28% in 2022 as monetary policy tightened. Amazon’s stock fell 51% last year, the biggest drop since 2000, when Amazon’s stock fell more than 80% of his.
Rate hikes could squeeze corporate profits and trigger a global recession, but the establishment is willing to make sacrifices to ensure workers’ demands for higher wages are contained.
Their aim is to hold the working class fully responsible for the escalating economic crisis as corporate profits hit $3 trillion in the second quarter of 2022 and $2.9 trillion in the third quarter. to inflict.
Urgent action is needed to stop layoffs at Amazon and other companies! The fight against layoffs must go hand in hand with the fight for massive wage increases to keep pace with skyrocketing inflation.
Fighting back requires the development of general commissions at Amazon and other companies, democratically controlled by the workers themselves and independent of trade union structures. During this year, the working class began to fight back, with mass strikes and other protests around the world. However, pro-business trade union structures have held back workers. The organization has stifled opposition and imposed successive reductions in real wages.
Organizations fighting to unionize Amazon workers after Amazon’s layoffs were announced have so far said nothing about the recent attacks on jobs, including Teamster. the Retail, Wholesale and Department Stores Union (RWDSU); or the so-called Independent Amazon Workers Union (ALU).
The Biden administration, as Democrats did last year against the struggle of railroad workers, is pushing the services of corporate unions, including the RWDSU, not to improve conditions for Amazon workers, but to suppress their opposition. The same process is being repeated internationally, including in the UK and other countries opposing the rising working class rebellion.
Against the reactionary nationalism of trade union structures, Amazon workers and other workers in the United States are growing workers in all countries facing the same conditions and the same consequences of the policies of the ruling classes. movements and struggles must unite. Tech layoffs in the US are part of an international restructuring that spans Europe and Asia.
The International Commission of the Fourth International initiated the formation of the International Workers’ Confederation of General Commissions to coordinate and unify the struggles of workers around the world.
The deployment of the working-class industrial counterattack must lead to the building of a working-class mass political movement against the Biden administration, America’s two major business parties, and all capitalist governments around the world.
The ruling class is responding to the capitalist crisis with increasingly brutal attacks on the working class. For millions of people, capitalism is left with nothing but mass deaths from escalating global pandemics, mass unemployment, world wars and increasingly authoritarian forms of rule.
The working class must respond through the conquest of state power by the working class, the confiscation of the wealthy’s vast fortunes, the transfer of giant corporations to public utilities, and the building of socialist movements. Reorganization of the economy based on social necessity, not private gain.
