Morning Note

Amazon fired 16,000 employees last week. 

At first glance, the terminations appeared standard. Online retail demand fluctuates with the seasons, and orders always decrease following the holidays. Factor in a few extra weeks of busyness due to post-Christmas returns, and late January makes sense as a time for layoffs. The gift-giving rush is over, so warehouses no longer need as many people. 

That is not a defense of a multi-trillion-dollar company pulling the plug on $15-per-hour workers, but if you’re a shrewd capitalist, the justification checks out. But there’s more to the story.

It turns out the 16,000 fired Amazonians, Americans whose lives their former employer just upended, were not seasonal warehouse workers or on-the-floor laborers. They were corporate employees. The cuts increased the company’s white-collar firings to 30,000 since October, good for 10% of Amazon’s corporate workforce and the largest axing in its three-decade history. 

Why did Amazon fire them? It wasn’t due to…