Amazon plans series of layoffs for 18,000 employees – IT Pro – News

It has now been more than 25 years since I have been in the luggage cellars of Schiphol, but that was not personnel from Schiphol itself, but from KLM and other companies, for example. At that time there was already quite a ditch of young hires (including myself), especially at night where only the comptroller was a permanent employee and the rest were young hires.

And it is of course very understandable that during a pandemic, where there are hardly any flights, you have almost no baggage handling and therefore hardly any need for staff. After more than 2 years, I don’t expect they still have full occupancy there. Just like with public transport, etc.

However, more than 25 years ago it was already becoming a drama. I worked mostly nights, weekends 3×8 at 180% (during “study”), it wasn’t bad money then (at that age for that job). But at a certain point the companies no longer wanted precarious work for 8-hour blocks, but an hour here and a few hours there. In the beginning, the employment agency was able to string together shifts for more than 8 hours of work, but at some point even that started to become difficult, so I eventually switched to loading and later stopped altogether at Schiphol.

Now it’s easy to blame shareholders, but I can tell you that consumers always want everything cheaper, and that “cheaper” has to come from somewhere, because shareholders just aren’t going to lose money structurally, so they’d rather close the curtain. And I saw then that especially during the summer holidays there was a lot of booking through super cheap flights where in reality you had to put a lot of question marks. I’ve handled a lot of those carousels myself for passengers checking in, someone else drove, when flights arrived, we helped unload a flight with 2-3 people and it was actually very doable. The unloading/loading of the planes themselves was done by a completely different team.

Even for Schiphol money, pay peanuts, get monkeys. And if the monkeys can get more peanuts from someone else, they’ll go to that other person. And the tension in the labor market looks exciting in 2022, but unemployment actually increased during the time this was happening at Schiphol…