From The Verge:
In January Amazon said that it plans to hire 100,000 more workers in the next 18 months, which received a fair amount of attention in the news. But it turns out that’s right in line with Amazon’s current hiring habits.
According to the company’s fourth quarter earnings report released yesterday, Amazon’s full-time and part-time employees, excluding contractors and temp workers, jumped from 230,800 thousand at the end of 2015 to 341,400 at the end of 2016.
That’s a crazy number of new workers — nearly the size of Microsoft’s entire workforce, as GeekWire points out here — and places Amazon in the upper echelon of the nations’s biggest employers. It’s also a part of Amazon’s grand plan to manage every aspect of its shipping and distribution network, as it builds out its own cargo airline hubs and ocean freight shipping networks.
There are a few caveats, of course. Many of these new jobs were in fulfillment roles in the third and fourth quarters of the year, according to Amazon’s chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky, who also noted that of the 26 new warehouses Amazon added, 23 were added in the second half of 2016. So, while some of these new jobs may be delivery jobs or technical jobs, the “predominant factor” is headcount around fulfillment jobs.
Link to the rest at The Verge and thanks to Jan for the tip.
PG says some who write for The Verge may disdain “fulfillment jobs” but he expects that Amazon will have multiple qualified applicants for each opening.
“(Trump feels American workers are overpaid)”
All this time I thought he was railing against the minimum wage. But, now, at least, I’ve been straightened out by political commentary on TPV.
Dan
Eleven bucks an hour is nothing. After a few years of seniority, automotive workers were estimated to be getting something like $75.00 an hour including benefits such as matching pension contributions. While some will probably find that excessive, (Trump feels American workers are overpaid) the fact is that Bezos’ jobs can only ever be temporary as smaller and more flexible robots enter the workplace. The worst are the immigrant Mexican robots.
The UAW ones in Detroit were.
Which is one reason why so much of North American auto production moved to the southern states, Canada, and Mexico. And why GM went bankrupt, Ford mortgaged up to its name, and Chrysler was sold to Daimler-Benz and eventually given away to Fiat just to keep it running.
Even the Toyota-run coop factory with GM ended belly up and going to Tesla for peanuts.
There is such a thing as a labor market and, like most competitive markets, money flows to the lower cost channels.
As for the Amazon jobs: consider those are *starting* entry-level salaries, not a cap or an average. And that Amazon not only allows upwards mobility, they facilitate it by paying for added training and education. There is plenty of upwards mobility there for the motivated and capable.
Btw, American workers are by far the most productive workers on the planet but that is because that productivity comes from high value-add jobs that require precision, skill, and education. Not from low vakue-add meat-robot jobs that have been priced out of the labor market. And thus, ahrm, do not count in the stats.
Not a fact many are willing to bring up, though.
It is not unlike what the BPHs are doing to themselves, dropping mass market for trade paperbacks, over-pricing ebooks, and extolling the “resurgence” of independent bookstores while quietly neglecting that most of those growing bookstores are used bookstores so a lot of that sales revenue growth at those stores doesn’t go to tradpubs, much less their authors.
But hey, print is back!
High prices work!
(Mostly for those that don’t charge them.)
Eleven bucks an hour is nothing.
The employment lines many Amazon warehouses show many disagree.
That is a decision made by the individual. He decides if it is something or nothing.
Montana would love to have these jobs.
11.00/hr with benefits is pretty awesome for a entry level position. Good for them.
These jobs were advertised in Central Texas during the holidays, to staff up a couple of new warehouses in the area. These are NOT temporary positions; they are being advertised as permanent, starting at $11.00/hour, with health benefits from Day One of employment.
NOTHING to sneeze at … especially if you’re out of work!