What is ‘silent sacking’ that Amazon allegedly used to cut its workforce?

Workplace trends have changed over the past few years, ranging from “quiet quitting” to “grumpy staying.”

Still, “silent sacking,” “silent firing,” or “silent layoffs” might be the worst yet.

E-commerce giant Amazon has been accused of allegedly using “silent sacking” as a way to reduce staff without having to fire workers and avoid bad publicity.

Here’s what it means.

What is silent sacking?

Silent sacking is just another term for “quiet firing.”

The practice involves the management creating a work environment with deteriorating conditions – overwork, stalled promotions, little support from management – to push employees to resign rather than firing them

It’s a subtle tactic used by managers to make a role less appealing and encourage employees to leave.

This happens more frequently with contract or interim staff without any explanation or an excuse, according to Stellarmann.com.

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Even while it could be standard practice at the workplace today, it isn’t ethical, productive, or excellent leadership.

According to Gallup, it undermines team trust, damages your employer’s reputation as a positive place to work, and may even make it more difficult for you to satisfy consumers when important employees leave.

Why do businesses ‘silently sack’ employees?

Because the move could cut costs for a company.

When employees depart, they would no longer be required to give them severance benefits.

Layoffs can be very expensive for businesses due to the need for employees to receive severance benefits in the event of their termination.

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For instance, Microsoft’s second-quarter 2023 earnings suffered a $1.2 billion loss as a result of layoffs and other reorganisation initiatives, according to The Street.

As to a CNBC report, Amazon, which has been implementing rolling layoffs since 2022, provided its US employees with full pay and benefits for 60 days during which they were paid but were not required to continue working.

Following that time, Amazon provided the fired workers with a separation payment, job placement assistance, transitional health insurance, and several weeks of severance compensation based on how long they had worked for the company.

The company will save time and money by “silently sacking” workers rather than going through the full procedure.

This is what John McBride and Justin Garrison, two former workers of Amazon with offices in Denver and Los Angeles, highlighted.

How is Amazon using this to get rid of its employees?

McBride spent a year till June 2023 working for Amazon Web Services (AWS).

He stated that anyone who has been following the company for years should not have been shocked by CEO Andy Jassy’s announcement in a recent post on X.

“Ultimately, it comes down to taxes and economics,” he said.

The Colorado-based engineer broke down Amazon’s supposed plan into five phases:

2. Laying off 30,000 employees

3. Return-to-office mandate: Employees were required to work from an office near their residence two to three days a week. “I went into the Denver office near me, a 20-minute commute.”

4. Return to team: Here employees had to work from offices where their team was physically located. In McBride’s case, it meant moving to a different city, Seattle. “Many, many people left during this phase. This is when I personally left in 2023 because I wouldn’t relocate to Seattle,” he said.

5. Silent sacking: “If you managed to somehow stick around this long, your work life would be made incredibly unsatisfying and cumbersome: you’d be left out of in-person meetings, you’d be stiff-armed by management, you wouldn’t be given interesting or meaningful work, etc.”

6. Death of remote: “Everyone must sit at a desk in a physical office where your team is located.”

Robert Lacis also spent nearly five years working for the e-commerce giant.

According to his post on LinkedIn, Lacis was employed as a “virtual employee,” but after Jassy revealed the company’s intentions to resume operations, he was given the choice to leave or relocate to Seattle to work from the company’s headquarters.

“Having made important life decisions to move to Lake Oswego, Oregon, for the benefit of my family, moving to Seattle did not align at all,” he said.

In contrast, Justin Garrison worked with AWS for around four years as a senior developer advocate before he was fired in January of this year. Having not worked for nearly three months, he left the company.

He had a job, but no work was assigned to him; Amazon did not fire him.

“On September 1, 2024, I was told by my skip level manager and VP that my team and an adjacent team were being eliminated. They claimed we all did such good work that they wanted us to remain at Amazon. ‘We still have a job, just not a role,’” he wrote in his blog.

Garrison kept hearing from his management that severance would only be considered after all other options had been explored.

“They told us our number one priority was to find another job. Every role we found had significant downsides. Lower pay, lower title, RTO, or various other things. It was clear they wanted us to take a different role we could quit later. My management wanted to retain the headcount, but couldn’t do layoffs.”

For the next two and a half months, Garrison received a “variety of excuses” or was ignored whenever he enquired about the status of his job and severance pay.

“On January 10, I officially quit Amazon. My manager called me asking about what work I would be doing like none of this ever happened. I knew he would try to put me on a PIP (performance improvement plan) and I wasn’t going to stick around for that,” he said.

How does it help Amazon?

“Now that spending and books across the economy are very tight,” according to McBride, Amazon’s decision is an attempt to minimise headcount, avoid a big tax liability, and raise profit margins.

The former employee of Amazon went on to say that although the company receives significant tax breaks in the cities where its offices are located, empty offices would not provide the government with any incentive to keep allowing the company to operate tax-free.

“If Amazon continued to enable a remote workforce, the tax man would come knocking and they’d be liable for hundreds of millions of dollars,” McBride said.

“In the end, Amazon’s strict return-to-office policy isn’t just about fostering innovation or collaboration — it’s a strategic move driven by macro and micro-economics. By consolidating their workforce in physical offices, they’re aiming to maximise tax incentives and reduce operational costs.”

With inputs from agencies