- Amazon employees are complaining about projected cuts, according to internal messages.
- Amazon has a complex pay system that includes a lot of equity-based compensation.
- This means actual compensation can vary widely from projections.
Some Amazon employees are complaining about cuts in future pay, according to internal Slack messages viewed by Business Insider.
This is the time of year when employees at Amazon hear about their compensation. The company has a complex system for paying staff, so it's common for internal debates to crop up when updates such as this happen.
Some staff posted on Slack recently that they were seeing cuts of as much as 20% to their projected total compensation.
Stock awards are a major part of how Amazon pays workers, so actual compensation can end up being different from projections. This is especially true when the company's shares are volatile. And this has certainly been the case in recent years when the stock plunged and then surged back.
Amazon typically bakes in a 15% increase in its stock price every year when calculating future compensation. If the stock price instead jumps 100% in that timeframe, actual pay will exceed projections.
In some of the messages viewed by BI, Amazon employees wrote that their projected compensation for 2025 was less than the projections for 2024.
"I was surprised to see my projected total compensation for 2025 in my 2024 PCS is about 10% less than my projected total compensation for 2024 in my 2023 PCS. Why would that happen," one employee wrote in a Slack channel labeled "pay equity discussion."
"PCS" refers to the personal compensation statements that Amazon employees get.
An Amazon spokesperson, Margaret Callahan, said that there had been no companywide shift in pay approach and that compensation was based on factors including type of job, location, level, and performance.
Other Amazon employees on Slack complained of cuts as high as 20% in total compensation, though the messages didn't say whether the drop was between actual or projected pay.
One concerned employee shared their own pay projections with BI showing a drop in projected pay between 2024 and 2025.
"Business Insider is cherry picking anecdotes from a handful of employees to fit their pre-determined narrative," Callahan said in a statement.
"Due to the growth in Amazon's stock price over the past year (approximately 77%), many employees' compensation in 2024 will meaningfully exceed the amount that the company planned for them to earn," she added.
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Watch: How tech layoffs could affect the economy
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