Amazon.com Inc. had a bad year in 2022, with the e-commerce and cloud giant recording its biggest loss ever. Its employees had a bad year, too: For the first time in 20 years, the company shrank its workforce. According to Amazon’s 2022 annual report, released late Thursday, the company had 1,541,000 full- and part-time employees as of Dec. 31, 2022. That’s down 4.2% from the 1,608,000 employees Amazon had at the end of 2021.
That marked the first decline in its workforce since the dot-com bust. In 2001, Amazon cut staff by 13.3% to 7,800 employees, and in 2002 it cut by a further 3.9% to 7,500 employees. Amazon’s stock
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tumbled 49.6% in 2022, the biggest yearly loss since the record 79.6% plunge in 2000. While 67,000 jobs were lost in 2022, the company had increased its workforce by 810,000 jobs in 2020 and 2021, for an overall gain of 101.5% from the 798,000 employees in prepandemic 2019. Also read: Amazon’s second wave of layoffs hits thousands of employees across three states. And don’t miss: U.S. unemployment rate falls to 3.4% — lowest level since 1969 — as economy creates 517,000 jobs in January. Over the 19 straight years that Amazon increased its workforce, the average year-over-year increase was 33.9% (the median increase was 31.4%). The biggest increase was 66.8% in 2011, when Amazon had 56,200 employees, and the …