Pushed by Pandemic, Amazon Goes on a Hiring Spree Without Equal (nytimes.com) 42
Amazon has embarked on an extraordinary hiring binge this year, vacuuming up an average of 1,400 new workers a day and solidifying its power as online shopping becomes more entrenched in the coronavirus pandemic. From a report: The hiring has taken place at Amazon's headquarters in Seattle, at its hundreds of warehouses in rural communities and suburbs, and in countries such as India and Italy. Amazon added 427,300 employees between January and October, pushing its work force to more than 1.2 million people globally, up more than 50 percent from a year ago. Its number of workers now approaches the entire population of Dallas. The spree has accelerated since the onset of the pandemic, which has turbocharged Amazon's business and made it a winner of the crisis. Starting in July, the company brought on about 350,000 employees, or 2,800 a day. Most have been warehouse workers, but Amazon has also hired software engineers and hardware specialists to power enterprises such as cloud computing, streaming entertainment and devices, which have boomed in the pandemic.
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. Such rapid growth is unrivaled in the history of corporate America. It far outstrips the 230,000 employees that Walmart, the largest private employer with more than 2.2 million workers, added in a single year two decades ago. The closest comparisons are the hiring that entire industries carried out in wartime, such as shipbuilding during the early years of World War II or home building after soldiers returned, economists and corporate historians said.
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. Such rapid growth is unrivaled in the history of corporate America. It far outstrips the 230,000 employees that Walmart, the largest private employer with more than 2.2 million workers, added in a single year two decades ago. The closest comparisons are the hiring that entire industries carried out in wartime, such as shipbuilding during the early years of World War II or home building after soldiers returned, economists and corporate historians said.
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Not really...
It's popular opinion, but that doesn't make it true.
They pay well for unskilled labor and it's an interesting place to work for skilled labor. They are not market competitive for development work, but there are so few infrastructure issues to deal with. They solved so many of the basic issues a long time ago and it is so painful working in a smaller shop.
Want metrics, alarms, dashboards, automated roll back, pipelines, cd, stream logging and analysis for free? No problem! Once you are spun up i
Re: I guess the mentioned churn is less this year. (Score:1, Flamebait)
What salary do you suggest is enough to manage a family? And why is it Amazonâ(TM)s responsibility to provide that? If Amazon didnâ(TM)t exist the person would have to be a farmer or something working 16 hour days, who knows. Whatever any Amazon worker had before they got their Amazon job was worse, why else would they take the job? Amazon hasnâ(TM)t forced anyone to work for them, if anything weâ(TM)re forcing Amazon to not hire more needy foreign labor which would give them an even bet
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Of course they do.
Most journalists are lazy/overworked/do not care(take your pick) and will publish articles sent to them that are of good enough quality and seem interesting enough without any critique or care..
Thus good PR teams can often push their ready made stories widely and Amazon has hired a lot of really good PR people who will write then write such stories.
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The reality in marketing and sales by the way, is women love, love, love the shopping experience and will most definitely go back to it. Even men prefer the touch and feel for the right product probably more power tools than hand bags though. Amazon will be sacking those workers without a seconds hesitation. They will tell them, sure move to where the business is and then sack them once they have, then can try to apply again in future at half pay sort of thing.
Online sales grow during shutdowns, like who th
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Ya know, Thanksgiving is an American holiday... no increase in orders outside the US is to be expected today. This protest makes news, but it doesn't really matter. Oh, and hiring a bunch of workers may be a plot to break such unions.
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Canada celebrates Thanksgiving on a different day... but loves to come across the border when stuff is cheap here.
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the source of this article is Amazon By The New York Times and it is in direct response to Amazon workers staging a coordinated black friday protest in 15 Countries https://www.vice.com/en/articl... [vice.com] Amazon has pulled this shit before. Dozens of Local TV stations once aired an Amazon PR piece on worker safety as if it were a real news story https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/2... [cnbc.com]
And ... therefore the numbers stated here are false then? Or not?
Re: this is astroturfing, NOT NEWS. (Score:2, Troll)
Most news is initiated by corporate PR nowadays, by the way.
The rest are light "infotainment" fluff pieces with no meaning.
My dad is an old-style investigative journalist who risked his life regularly, and now only gets told to produce light fluff that doesn't threaten corporations, as they "might sue".
They did sue in the past too. But then news agencies had good lawyers and most imporantly, judges were generally on the right side of things.
Judges might even still be... but editors have become massive pussi
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That's sad to hear. I wonder what the solution for this problem is. I hope there is one.
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It's great that you call attention to some shady business by Amazon and some disreputable news orga
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Re:Do you want a capitalist dystopia? (Score:5, Interesting)
It is interesting to see how this develops in the EU compared to the US.
In general more people in US seem to worry about government getting too powerful and less about companies getting too powerful currently.
But in the EU it seems less so and more people seem to worry more about companies getting too powerful than they worry about governments.
In both places there are of course people worried about the opposite, but those seem to be the majorities in those places.
Also in the EU, the countries and EU itself seem to be fighting the corporate power(to keep/gain own power) a lot more currently than in US.
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I'm not worried about Amazon getting too powerful because they're providing desired products to more people than any other supplier in the world at a price people want to pay in a fashion more convenient than the competitors. I'm more worried about Amazon getting more powerful because the government has locked us in our homes, forcing us to use the one company that is capable of supplying us at home because we're not allowed to shop anywhere else by government mandate. Corporations using the enforcement pow
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you're funny, the western banking cartel is centuries old. try to be more timely with your warnings next time.
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Re: Do you want a capitalist dystopia? (Score:1)
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Re: Or maybe they could pay their employees well? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Maybe they could use all that money to pay their employees enough to not live in poverty?
The lowest entry-level wage at Amazon is more than twice the official poverty line.
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Don't worry, Edison Carter will be there to save us.
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I'd give you a positive mod point if'n I ever had one to give. My label is "corporate cancer" and this is certainly cancerous growth.
However the reason I stopped doing business with Amazon 20 years ago was the brainphishing. I guess they call it microtargeting now? Based on intrusive surveillance.
In an interesting coincidence, I emailed someone about borrowing the The Age of Surveillance Capitalism the other day and the book disappeared before I could get there. Gap on the shelf was still warm. Such a rem
We're in a pandemic. Where is hiring to prepare? (Score:5, Interesting)
We're in a pandemic. We've had almost a year's warning that winter is coming.
-- Where is the mass hiring to train nurse assistants?
-- Where is the mass hiring to manufacture hundreds of millions of PPE?
-- Where is the mass hiring to manufacture hundreds of millions of test supplies?
-- Where is the mass hiring to manufacture hundreds of millions of vaccine supplies?
-- Where is the mass hiring to build warehouses to hold the PPE, test, and vaccine supplies hospitals in your town will need? Or maybe you think your supplier will have any basic supplies in stock in a couple months.
It's like no one read the story of the ant and the grasshopper.
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Time for Joe to use the War Powers Act like it should be to ramp up and monitor production.
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Time to reinstate the draft. There are plenty of currently unemployed, plus all the NEETs, that could be put to work.
Explore a list of grant and funding opportunities (Score:1)
Is it high? (Score:4, Insightful)
Amazon has 1125300 employees and Amazon is doubling its size every 3 years, so normal hiring rate at this point should be 1125300/3/365 = 1028 employees per day + people to replace leaving employees.
How many people are leaving Amazon per day? Turnover rate at Amazon is about 40%, so 1125300*0,4/365 = 1233 per day needs to be hired just to cover the turnover rate. https://www.seattletimes.com/b... [seattletimes.com]
This means that minimum hiring rate should be 1233 per day and normal hiring rate should be 1233+1028 = 2261 per day. Compared to that, 1400 per day is not that much.
There is obvious reason for this. Robots. Amazon does not need double amount of employees to double its size in money. It needs only 1400-1233=167 new employees per day.
But if look back into the history, we see that Amazon has more than doubled its employee amount every 3 years. This means that automation level in Amazon is increasing. https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
All of this is just quick speculation, the math or numbers could be wrong so please check before using in public.
But anyway, 1400 does not sound big to me.
Don't fuckin work there! It's not worth it! (Score:1)
I know you're short on money, kid, but for all that is holy, don't do it!
You don't want to work for Rockefeller, in a trap that leaves you no time to even *think* about finding a better job once you notice it is hell! You'll be stuck in overtime days until you are nothing but a husk to be thrown away and replaced like a broken down oil filter. You'll be too damaged for normal life! Might aswell work in an east-Asian sweat shop. Cause it's disguised well, like any good trap, but it *is* a sweat shop!
I bet it has little to do with pandemic (Score:2)
Naznin communication in bhedia (Score:1)