New York, where Amazon has been rapidly expanding its real estate, isn’t being spared from 14,000 corporate job cuts planned by the tech giant globally.
Amazon plans to lay off 660 Manhattan-based staff in January, including 233 employees at Brookfield-owned 5 Manhattan West at 450 W. 33rd St. and 182 at Amazon’s New York headquarters at the former Lord & Taylor’s department store at 424 Fifth Ave., according to Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notifications filed with the New York State Department of Labor, better known as WARN notices.
The e-commerce and cloud computing juggernaut employs over 47,000 in New York state, an Amazon spokesperson told CoStar News, declining to specify the company’s headcount in the city. The spokesperson also declined to elaborate on Amazon’s real estate plans in the wake of the planned job cuts.
Amazon said in October it’s cutting about 14,000 corporate jobs as it seeks to cut “bureaucracy” and remove “layers.”
The planned job cuts in New York come as Amazon has been fast expanding its footprint in the city and other markets after acknowledging it didn’t have enough space to accommodate all of the employees it had called back to their workspaces five days a week.
For instance, Amazon in May purchased 522 Fifth Ave. just about five blocks north of its Manhattan home, its first Manhattan office acquisition since buying the former Lord & Taylor building in 2020.
Amazon had redeveloped 424 Fifth into an office campus for more than 2,000 of its New York-area employees, Amazon previously said.
Amazon also signed one of Manhattan’s largest office leases this year at the former HSBC U.S. headquarters building at 10 Bryant Park, just across the street from its Manhattan flagship. The company also has expanded its office footprint via a mixture of direct leases, subleases and a partnership with global flexible workplace provider WeWork in New York and other cities such as Miami and Mountain View, California.
Employees in seven other New York offices also will be affected by the job cuts, including 91 at 410 10th Ave. and 58 at 7 W. 34th St., according to the WARN notices.