Amazon layoffs of 14,000 corporate employees will not affect workers at fulfillment centers in the Chattanooga area that employ more than 2,000 people.
The internet retail giant announced the layoffs Tuesday as officials said the company wants to “reduce bureaucracy” while investing in artificial intelligence.
“This reduction only impacted corporate employees (not folks at fulfillment centers/warehouses),” Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan said in an email.
(READ MORE: Hamilton County employers cutting staff as nationwide signs point to ‘economic cooling’)
Callahan did not immediately respond to a question about whether there were any corporate Amazon employees in the Chattanooga area who would be laid off. The Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce did not have official information Wednesday in response to a request for comment about whether any Amazon employees in the area would be laid off.
Amazon announced in 2010 it would build two 1-million-square-foot fulfillment centers in Hamilton and Bradley counties through a $139 million investment.
The company operates the fulfillment centers at Enterprise South Industrial Park near the Volkswagen plant and in Charleston, north of Cleveland.
Amazon is the No. 15 largest employer in the Chattanooga area, with 1,472 full-time employees and 575 part-time employees as of Dec. 31, 2024, according to the chamber.
The retailer is the No. 3 largest employer in Bradley County, which is not included in the Chattanooga chamber’s estimates. There are 1,100 Amazon employees in Bradley County, according to the Cleveland-Bradley Chamber of Commerce.
Seattle-based Amazon is the No. 2 largest employer in the U.S., with 1.55 million employees. It plans to cut up to 30,000 corporate jobs as it scales back from a hiring spree during the pandemic, sources told Reuters.
The cuts would amount to nearly 10% of Amazon’s 350,000 corporate employees. It is the largest workforce reduction at Amazon since 2023, when the company laid off 27,000 employees.
“This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before,” Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology at Amazon, said in a message to employees posted online Tuesday. “We’re convinced that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business.”
Most employees who are laid off will have 90 days to look for a new role at Amazon, and the company will provide severance pay and other benefits to those who aren’t hired, Galetti said.
Amazon recently announced plans to invest $10 billion in a data center campus in North Carolina and has committed $10 billion apiece to multiple other data center projects, The Associated Press reported.
Contact business reporter Daniel Dassow at ddassow@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6318.