Roughly 14,000 corporate jobs are to go at tech giant Amazon, the company announced.

The impact on the 75,000-strong UK workforce is not immediately clear from the announcement, which said impacted people and teams would hear from leadership on Tuesday.

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A loss of 30,000 jobs had been anticipated based on reporting from Reuters and The Wall Street Journal.

Amazon workers’ union in the UK, GMB, had said, based on those numbers, that “it is almost inevitable that many UK workers will lose their jobs”.

“The fact that companies can accrue such astronomical profits to the point where its [founder, Jeff Bezos] can holiday in space and hire out entire cities for his vulgar wedding prior to casting aside loyal workers without a thought just underlines everything that’s wrong with a system that many feel is beyond repair,” the union said.

Why?

The growth of artificial intelligence (AI) has been blamed for the cuts.

In a message sent to staff, Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology, Beth Galetti, alluded to the criticism that the company is cutting jobs while profiting £19.2bn in results published in July.

“Some may ask why we’re reducing roles when the company is performing well,” she wrote.

“What we need to remember is that the world is changing quickly. 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.”

Amazon is also continuing to unravel some of the hiring it made during the COVID-19 pandemic and has warned about reducing headcount and bureaucracy.

In May 2021, for example, the business said it was hiring more than 10,000 UK jobs.

The largest ever cut of 18,000 Amazon roles was announced in January 2023 when the consumer retail part of the business, including Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go, were scaled back.

It plans to replace more than half a million jobs with robots, automating 75% of its operations, according to the New York Times.

What next?

Those who lose their job will be prioritised for openings within Amazon to help “as many people as possible” find new roles, she said.

Hiring will continue, despite the latest cull, in “key strategic areas” while the online retail behemoth finds additional places we can “remove layers, increase ownership, and realise efficiency gains”.

Amazon said it is “shifting resources to ensure we’re investing in our biggest bets and what matters most to our customers’ current and future needs”.

In the UK, GMB said, “We will be supporting our members across Amazon as they face this uncertain future.”

It is to announce financial results for the third quarter of this year on Thursday evening, UK time.

Amazon UK has been contacted for comment.

KitKats, Gaviscon, toothpaste, and even Freddo have all fallen victim to shrinkflation, consumer group Which? has found.

As families struggle with the cost of a trip to the supermarket, a survey of shoppers revealed how many products are getting smaller – while others are being downgraded with cheaper ingredients.

Among the examples are:

• Aquafresh complete care original toothpaste – from £1.30 for 100ml to £2 for 75ml at Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Ocado

• Gaviscon heartburn and indigestion liquid – from £14 for 600ml to £14 for 500ml at Sainsbury’s

• Sainsbury’s Scottish oats – from £1.25 for 1kg to £2.10 for 500g

• KitKat two-finger multipacks – from £3.60 for 21 bars to £5.50 for 18 bars at Ocado

• Quality Street tubs – from £6 for 600g to £7 for 550g at Morrisons

• Freddo multipacks – from £1.40 for five bars to £1.40 for four bars at Morrisons, Ocado and Tesco

Which? also received reports of popular treats missing key ingredients, as manufacturers seek to cut costs.

The amount of cocoa butter in white KitKats has fallen below 20%, meaning they can no longer actually be sold as white chocolate.

It comes after Penguin and Club bars lost their legal status as a chocolate biscuit, as they now contain more palm oil and shea oil than cocoa – as reported in the Sky News Money blog.

Which? retail editor Reena Sewraz called on supermarkets to be “more upfront” about price changes to help households “already under immense financial pressure” get better value.

While keeping track of the size and weight of products can be tricky, Which? has two top tips for detecting shrinkflation.

The first is to be wary of familiar products labelled as “new” – because the only thing that’s new may end up being the smaller size.

Meanwhile, the second is to pay attention to how much an item costs per 100g or 100ml, as this can be an easy way of finding out when prices change.

What have the companies said?

A spokeswoman for Mondelez International, which makes Cadbury products, said any change to product sizes are a “last resort”, but it’s facing “significantly higher input costs across our supply chain” – including for energy.

A Nestle spokesman said it was seeing “significant increases in the cost of coffee”, and some “adjustments” were occasionally needed “to maintain the same high quality and delicious taste that consumers know and love”.

“Retail pricing is always at the discretion of individual retailers,” they added.

A spokesman for the Food and Drink Federation also pointed to government policy, notably national insurance increases for employers and a new packaging tax.

Fresh food prices on the rise

The Which? report comes as latest figures showed fresh food costs 4.3% more than it did a year ago.

The increase in October, reported by the British Retail Consortium (BRC) and market researchers NIQ, was up on the 4.1% year-on-year rise in September.

Overall food inflation was down slightly, though, to 3.7% from last month’s 4.2%.

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There has also been a slowdown in overall shop price inflation, which the BRC said was down to “fierce competition among retailers” ahead of Black Friday sales.

The annual shopping extravaganza will this year arrive in the same week as the chancellor’s budget, which is set for Wednesday 26 November.

BRC chief executive Helen Dickinson called on Rachel Reeves to help “relieve some pressures” keeping prices high, with the national insurance rise in last year’s budget having “directly contributed to rising inflation”.

“Adding further taxes on retail businesses would inevitably keep inflation higher for longer,” Ms Dickinson warned.

It’s not the start to the week that Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, would have been hoping for: more than 2,000 private sector jobs in Scotland at risk from the collapse of Petrofac, the London-listed oilfield services group.

Its slide into insolvency was triggered by last week’s cancellation of a major contract by its biggest customer, but the failure of a company once valued at more than £6bn has been a long time coming.

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Administrators at Teneo will now attempt to salvage what they can from Petrofac’s wreckage.

“The group’s operations will continue to trade, and options for alternative Restructuring and [sale] solutions are being actively explored with its key creditors,” Petrofac said on Monday morning.

“When appointed, administrators will work alongside Executive Management to preserve value, operational capability and ongoing delivery across the Group’s operating and trading entities.”

For thousands of employees, the future is now uncertain, although people close to the company say they are hopeful that a buyer can be found swiftly for its North Sea operations, with one suggesting that it could even happen in the coming days.

That would be a relief to Mr Miliband, whose energy policy has come under growing scrutiny in recent months amid dire warnings about the future of Britain’s offshore oil industry.