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Amazon looks to hire 75,000, offers $17 an hour and $1K sign-on bonus

Amazon is going on another hiring spree. The company announced on Thursday that it is looking to bring on 75,000 additional employees across its fulfillment and transportation segments. Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley breaks down the move by the e-commerce giant.

Video transcript

- Let's turn to the jobs market. We got a big story out here from Amazon today. Amazon announcing plans to hire 75,000 workers, are also offering various incentives in order to entice some of those workers to work for them. We want to bring in Dan Howley, who has this story for us. And Dan we've been talking about Amazon hiring quite a bit lately, they certainly have been on a hiring spree-- hiring spree. What can you tell us about their plans now?

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, there's going to be 75,000 workers across the country, a lot of them are going to be getting the option for that $100 bonus uh, for if you have a vaccine already or you are already vaccinated. Some place will also offer $1,000 signing bonus, and one of the big things I want to point out here is that the pay-- for a lot of these workers will be $17 an hour on average.

Now it's for warehouse and delivery workers-- the starting salary for warehouse workers is $15 an hour. So it'll be interesting to see if a lot of warehouse workers do get that $17 an hour, because at the outset of the pandemic-- Amazon was offering $17 an hour for hazard pay. But then as they pulled back that hazard pay they fell down to $15 an hour. And some of the places that had opened-- the fulfillment centers that had opened in that time span, a lot of the employees started at $17 and then fell back to $15.

So it'll be interesting to see where they start some of these new warehouse workers as far as salary goes, but that I think speaks to what Jeff Bezos had put out in his most recent and last newsletter or shareholders letter as CEO. Saying that they need to do better by their employees. So perhaps this is part of the way that he mentioned in doing that. And the other thing that is interesting to just point out is this comes after the union-- unionization drive in that Bessemer, Alabama fulfillment center had failed, so it seems to be coming at a time where Amazon is seemingly riding high after beating out that union vote.

Though the union does say that they are going to protest it, but then coming out and saying they're going to be offering this average $17 an hour salary would be kind of a smart move on their part. They are the second largest private employer in the country behind Walmart, and they did add hundreds of thousands of jobs in 2020 based on the surge that they saw from the pandemic. So well more than a million employees now underneath Amazon's umbrella.

- Dan they're going to be able to hire all those people. Though we've already seen that look if you're on the unemployment benefits with the extra federal stuff at least through September you're getting almost $20 an hour. So do they worry about being able to fill the pool?

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah. I think, look, anybody uh, you know a lot of places where you see Amazon set up shop uh, is in areas with a lot of warehouses already. Uh, and one of the issues that's been brought up with that $15 an hour salary is that they can depress wages in other warehouses based on that. So that might be a fear for hiring good people, but if they are going to be offering $17 an hour that unemployment benefits are not going to be there forever.

And if you have a job open 75,000 jobs across the country, there's an opportunity to get it and you're unemployed. Then this is-- you know, the-- the kind of goal for the long term right. The full-- full employment. So, ideally, you would see people say, OK, well, maybe I'm not going to be making that extra benefit, but I will have a job in the long term. And that benefits going to run out eventually, so this may be the smart way to go.

- Turn me a story to watch. All right, Dan Howley, Thanks so much for bringing us that.