Amazon is overstaffed?

The second-largest private employer in the United States is facing an issue that is unlike what we've been hearing.

In its recent quarterly earnings call the company informed its employees that they hired too quickly in its warehouses to keep up with the demand for hand sanitizers and masks, as well as to cover for workers who caught the omicron variant. The pandemic sales boom is subsiding as people leave their houses and more businesses open up. Amazon's chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky said on the call that "as the variant subsided in the second half of the quarter and employees returned from leave, we quickly transitioned from being understaffed to being overstaffed, resulting in lower productivity."

So far Amazon has not given any official statement that it will be laying off people, experts believe that it is unlikely that they will. Its warehouses typically experience more than 100% turnover in a given year mostly because of the strenuous working conditions. This current scenario is the polar opposite of the e-commerce giants' cries during the last few months when they struggled to hire enough workers to fill their evergrowing warehouses. The company hired around 270,000 workers just in the second half of last year to stay on top of its single-day delivery policy. Having said that, labor unions have been eyeing to unionize Amazon's US warehouses with considerable success in Staten Island, they believe workers are attracted to unionizing because of the employer's ambitious standards of workers' efficiency. 

Source: The Washington Post