As far as I'm aware, there's a fine line between layoffs or reductions in force and firing for poor performance. Its legal to cut an entire division, or to cut some percentage of a division's head count and come up with some way of distributing it across the org. It is not legal to find your worst performers, fire them all at once, and call it a layoff.
Happy to be wrong here though, just trying to be clear with the line as I understand it. Someone coming by may know for sure.
Does that matter? If people vote for him, he'll end up in Congress, regardless of "it matching" or not. The current president is a TV celebrity who ran a bunch of failed businesses, some middle manager from Amazon could surely be in Congress then?
If you scroll through his timeline, he's been gaining publicity by releasing videos critical of Amazon, too. There's too much of a conflict of interest involved with letting someone like that remain in a high position within the company.
After all, if 250 people report to me, probably some of them are going to have opinion A and some are going to have opinion B. If I take a strong public stance in support of A and against B, some of the more nervous B supporters are going to worry I hate them personally and fear I'm a threat to their career - and they're probably going to go to HR about it.
And even if my job doesn't give me any hiring-and-firing powers - if I'm high profile enough that a load of random haters decide they're going to try to get me fired by subjecting my employer to a campaign of harassment, well, now folks like HR and customer services are getting harassed.
Obviously, though, I've never seen a corporation have a blanket policy saying employees can't engage with the political system - that would be pretty bad as a policy. Instead they'll quote policies about 'bringing the company into disrepute' and similar.
The official registration and launch of the campaign was 2 months ago, but he started long before that. If you read his timeline he didn't just wake up one day and decide to run for Congress 2 months ago.
I don't think you can separate his active run for Congress from this layoff. Making an actual run for Congress is a huge time commitment and I don't see how it would be compatible with being an L7 manager at Amazon. It's not something you do in your free time.
His campaign platform also appears to be about AI taking jobs, so I'm more than a little suspicious that getting laid off was part of the plan rather than an actual surprise.
The claim that he "built systems" should also be taken in the context of his job title, which was in product management. I've held the Product Manager title for a few years, but I wouldn't claim "I built" during those times, because I was not the one doing the building. This strikes me as a little misleading.
Also that post is full of classic LLM-ism from beginning to end. Note the overuse of the "It's not this, it's that" format and other LLM tells. I might give someone the benefit of the doubt if they were immersed in LLMs so long that they started speaking like an LLM, but given all of the other context surrounding this post I have a high suspicion it was written by AI.