Amazon Layoffs: Amazon is reportedly planning to reduce 14,000 managerial positions by early next year in a bid to save $3 billion annually, according to a Morgan Stanley report. This initiative is part of CEO Andy Jassy’s strategy to boost operational efficiency by increasing the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15 per cent by March 2025.
The people managers are identified as the ones that can control and discipline the workforce to maximize their exploitation.
Whether they’re nice about it or they just really like their job as a slave driver doesn’t really change what their job is. Their job is to be the enforcers for upper management and this grants them a different class position.
I say this as someone who has worked for small companies, large companies, NGOs, and non-hierarchical collectives.
When you start working on something that is complex, and has a lot of moving parts, you need conductors. If you’ve got a better real-world example of an organizational model that works, I’m all ears.
Even in Leninist Russia, workplace structures had people managers in place to facilitate planning and to ensure that a team was aligned and set up to successfully accomplish a goal.
I’ve only ever seen one org structure that didn’t need some sort of people facilitation layer. And that was a tiny commune that a buddy of mine lived on. And everyone knew each other for years before they established said commune.
I’m not opposed to hierarchical organizational structures?
Under capitalism, the job of every single manager is to extract as much surplus value from the workers as possible. That’s their actual economic function. The problem isn’t the organizational model, the problem is the larger economic system they exist within.
If you had some kind of horizontal non-hierarchical collective under capitalism all that could do is turn everyone inside of it into petite-managers and force them to exploit themselves in order to hit productivity quotas. Or, more likely, it would fail because people don’t want to do that shit to themselves and need to be used and abused by a manager to make capitalism function.