As early as October, the Seattle giant will boost the average starting wage of frontline workers. The company made the announcement itself, explaining that the decision had been made to recruit new staff in view of the upcoming holidays and an increasingly difficult job market. Overall, a cost increase of about a billion is estimated
Amazon will increase the average starting wage of its US frontline employees from $18 to $19 an hour. The same company announced this, stating that the decision had been taken to recruit more workers in view of the Christmas holidays and to cope with a labor market that has become turbulent due to the phenomenon of large layoffs. All in all, the measure promises to lead to higher budgetary burdens of one billion dollars.
The announcement
The new pay plan will be operational as early as October, when warehouse and transportation workers will start earning between $16 and $26 per hour, depending on their location and location in the United States. The minimum wage awarded by Amazon, which employed some 1.5 million workers at the end of June 2022, will remain at $15 per hour. At the same time, the company also announced that its pay access program, Anytime Pay, will be changing to allow employees to be paid more than once or twice a month.
Complicated situation
The move of the giant founded by Jeff Bezos, fresh off a $1.7 billion acquisition, it is motivated by commercial but also structural reasons. On the one hand, the company must increase its additional workforce before the Prime Day of October, a discount day designed to test consumers’ pulse before Black Friday and beyond the Christmas holidays. On the other hand, it has to face the phenomenon of the great resignation that, since the outbreak of the pandemic, has led millions of Americans to leave their posts in search of change. Added to this are the union problems facing the giant: In fact, employee accusations and acronyms about salary and working conditions have multiplied. Not to mention that workers at the state warehouses in New York will vote for their representatives next month after an organizational campaign led by the Amazon Labor Union, the grassroots group of former and current employees of the company that saw a historic union victory. obtained at a warehouse on Staten Island last April.
Source: TG 24 Sky