The Ministry of Labour and Employment called Amazon’s Indian unit to appear before the Deputy Chief Labour Commissioner almost a week after the e-commerce giant declared it would eliminate 10,000 corporate employees. While the summons was scheduled for Wednesday, November 23, the development occurred on Tuesday, November 22.

The Labour Ministry has issued a summons to Amazon India on a layoff announcement

There are expected to be hundreds of layoffs at Amazon India, which employs about 100,000 people. The retail segment, which will likely experience the most of the losses, will affect corporate employees as well as data scientists and software developers.

The employee union Nascent Information Technology Employees Senate (NITES) submitted a lawsuit alleging that Amazon had broken labor regulations. In a letter to Bhupender Yadav, the minister of labor for the union, NITES said that Amazon employees had been fired forcefully from the company.

The union pushed for an investigation, claiming that a Voluntary Separation Programme was provided to workers with a deadlie of November 30 to finish the procedure. Therefore, according to NITES, many people’s livelihoods are in danger.

“You (Amazon) are therefore requested to attend this office with all relevant records in the matter either personally or through an authorised representative on the aforesaid date and time without fail,” the notification from the union law ministry stated.

Amazon runs AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Amazon Prime Video in addition to having a sizable share of the Indian e-commerce market.

Amazon issued a note to employees last week, on November 16 (local time), informing them of widespread layoffs. “After a deep set of reviews, we recently decided to consolidate some teams and programs. One of the consequences of these decisions is that some roles will no longer be required,” hardware chief Dave Limp wrote.

The fact that we will be losing great Amazonians from the Devices & Services organization makes it painful for me to convey this news, he continued.

One of the numerous tech giants that have announced staff reductions is Amazon. Twitter, Google’s parent business Alphabet, Facebook parent company Meta, and most recently HP have all announced layoffs.