“Amazon is hiring…2,800 people a day.”
While news of new job opportunities seems positive, Tiffany D. Cross pointed out that “Amazon employees top the list of those receiving public assistance like SNAP. ”
EXCERPTS from NY Times article:
The scale of hiring is even larger than it may seem because the numbers do not account for employee churn, nor do they include the 100,000 temporary workers who have been recruited for the holiday shopping season. They also do not include what internal documents show as roughly 500,000 delivery drivers, who are contractors and not direct Amazon employees.
[Note: I wonder if Amazon had a hand in passsing CA’s Measure 22 which exempted delivery driver contractors, along with Uber and Lyft, from being classified as employees?]
Adding so many new workers so fast in a pandemic has been a herculean task. Many workers feared catching the coronavirus in warehouses, so Amazon rolled out a fleet of safety measures to address Covid-19. And it revved up its hiring machine, which relies on technology and traditional recruitment.
That includes promoting its training, benefits and pay. Of its 810,000 workers who are in the United States, about 85 percent are frontline employees in warehouses and operations who earn a minimum of $15 an hour. That is higher than traditional retail work, where an average sales worker makes $13.19 an hour, but lower than typical warehousing jobs.
[Note: Warehouse work, especially under Amazon’s speed-up policies, is a lot more physically demanding and taxing than traditional retail, and given the confined quarters and large staff, a lot likelier to spread COVID.]