Nicholas Lee, a military veteran who is running for Congress from Texas’s 2nd Congressional District, said he lost his Amazon job in its latest tranche of layoff announced Wednesday. Amazon's senior vice president of people experience and technology, Beth Galetti, confirmed the layoff in a blog post. "As I shared in October, we've been working to strengthen our organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy," Galetti said. "While many teams finalized their organizational changes in October, other teams did not complete that work until now."
The announcement included assurance that US-based employees would get 90 days to look for a new role internally.
This layoff announcement comes as the company recently allowed H-1B workers who got stuck in India because of the visa stamping delay to work remotely.
Amid this situation, Nicholas Plumb said this does not happen in isolation and AI or performance are not the reasons. "I was an L7, I led global AI enablement. I built systems executives depended on, moved wherever the company needed me and fixed problems that had been sitting untouched because no one else could untangle them. And I was still cut," the Republican candidate said.
"Here’s the part we’re all supposed to politely ignore: in the U.S. right now, experience isn’t an asset, it’s a liability. And if you’re expensive because you’re good at what you do, the system eventually “optimizes” you out."
"This doesn’t happen in isolation. It’s enabled by a global labor market with almost no guardrails. Companies aren’t just competing on products anymore, they’re arbitraging labor across borders, wages, benefits and worker protections. When replacement is cheaper than retention, the decision gets framed as strategy instead of consequence."
Though he did not cite H-1B workers, the Republican candidate said experience labor gets swapped out through global labor substitution.
"I saw this coming and that’s why I’m running for Congress. I understand how this system works because I’ve lived inside it and I know it won’t fix itself. This is a rules problem and the rules are written by people who don’t bear the cost," he said pushing for his candidacy.
