From warehouses to its major presence at The Post building in downtown Vancouver, Amazon is a major employer in B.C., with more than 10,000 workers around the province. But as the company details plans to eliminate 16,000 positions globally, the local impact is unclear. “There’s 4,500 corporate employees here in downtown Vancouver,” said Peter Meiszner, a Vancouver city councillor with the ABC party. “So that’s high-tech employees. They’re working on things like AI, customer experience, web development. These are very important jobs.” Meiszner is watching the situation with concern, but is hopeful there will not be significant job losses in B.C. “They’ve actually been expanding their presence here,” Meiszner said. “They are about to move into the north tower of the complex. So I am optimistic that any impact in Vancouver will be limited.” Those in the tech sector say this latest round of layoffs highlights the ongoing economic challenges for the industry and a readjustment after the pandemic. “During COVID, many tech companies in Canada and the U.S. hired up with the anticipation that the usage of their tools would go up and they’d need that support,” said Vancouver tech entrepreneur Michael Tippett. “When COVID ended and that didn’t necessarily persist, there were a lot of employees that were essentially redundant.” But as for whether there’s any link between these layoffs and the emergence of artificial intelligence, that’s up for debate. “I’m quite skeptical that this has to do with AI,” said Adam Donald King, a University of Manitoba labour studies assistant professor, when asked whether that’s driving the layoffs. “I think it has more to do with Amazon re-sizing its work force after really expanding during the pandemic.” Amazon would not provide detailed information about how many jobs could be affected locally.
