Amazon To Offer Permanent Roles To 70% of 175,000 New US Hires

Amazon plans to offer permanent jobs to about 70% of the U.S. workforce it has hired temporarily to meet consumer demand during the coronavirus pandemic, the company told Reuters on Thursday. From a report: The world's largest online retailer will begin telling 125,000 warehouse employees in June that they can keep their roles longer-term. The remaining 50,000 workers it has brought on will stay on seasonal contracts that last up to 11 months, a company spokeswoman said. The decision is a sign that Amazon's sales have increased sufficiently to justify an expanded workforce for order fulfillment, even as government lockdowns ease and rivals open their retail stores for pickup. Amazon started the hiring spree in March with a blog post appealing to workers laid off by restaurants and other shuttered businesses, promising employment "until things return to normal and their past employer is able to bring them back."

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[rsilvergun]

Amazon had over 122,000 perma-temps. In a society where your entire quality of life is built around your job and that constantly touts "Job Creators" and to social good they bring that should be a crime.

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[ShanghaiBill]

Many of these people were retail employees, previously on zero-hour contracts.

Amazon pays all employees at least $15/hour, so many of them are better paid than in their previous jobs.

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[rsilvergun]

true, but the work is brutal. Most can't do it for more than a few years. The pace is too high. They start to develop repetitive stress injuries.

That is rather nice of them

[Major_Disorder]

I am not usually a fan of Amazon, and hope I never have to work for them, but for those people working Temp jobs, a little bit of certainty is nice to have.

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[misexistentialist]

doubt there is much certainty since they can be fired by a productivity algorithm

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[Major_Disorder]

doubt there is much certainty since they can be fired by a productivity algorithm

As much certainty as there is in any job these days.

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[Aereus]

Little bit worse than that. Their time is managed down to the second as they are tracked. Even taking a bathroom break counts against your quotas and averages. In some Amazon warehouses pink slips are generated automatically if your numbers are considered...inadequate.

Reminds me of the scene in 5th Element where Corbin gets fired by mail.

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[Toonol]

In other words, they calc your productivity by the mysterious evil formula: ( Units Done ) / ( Shift Length ).

Re:That is rather nice of them

[Aereus]

And time per order fulfilled. And time per item picked. And route deviations compared to the theoretical optimal path.

If you like being a robot, go for it. Most people don't.

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[Waccoon]

Yes, and they generally follow this formula to the letter and don't give a damn if it works or not.

I didn't work for Amazon, but in the warehouse I worked, I was told I had two weeks to get my numbers up or I'd be canned. The reason why I couldn't get my work done was because their voice picking system didn't work at all with my voice, and it kept crashing all the time (also, the volume of the headset would change at random so I couldn't hear). Also, the company openly admitted that the numbers were "adju

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[Joe_Dragon]

drivers have an pee cup

Amazon feels they'll keep this extra market share

[ranton]

Keeping these employees on permanently sure makes sense if Amazon feels this shift towards more online shopping will continue even after the crisis is over. And even if that isn't the case, we will be in some sort of semi-lock down state for quite some time, and by then Amazon would have needed to hire an extra 100k workers anyway.

there is no such thing as permanent role.

[slapitalist]

These are going to be direct hire roles doing the same thing as temp hires. direct hire = at will employment â permanent

And the compensation package provides for...

[thragnet]

paid funerals.

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[Joe_Dragon]

no we just give workers comp