This is the first major push in hiring since new chief executive Andy Jassy took over from Jeff Bezos in July. It is ahead of the company’s annual Race Day, which is scheduled for September 15th.
Most new jobs will feature business and technology jobs, which Jassy told Reuters is needed to help the company keep pace with retail demand, advertising and cloud computing, business units that rose during the Covid-19 pandemic. Amazon’s effort to launch a constellation of miniature satellites into space to provide high-speed broadband access, called Project Kuiper, is also staffed, he said.
The new hires will grow Amazon’s global corporate and technology staff, which currently totals about 275,000, up 20%, the company said.
Amazon hired nearly 500,000 employees in 2020 (though some of that could have been due to the company’s constant and significant turnover among hourly workers), and the latter effort is aimed at making This year’s race in the largest of the company.
In the United States, the company plans to add 40,000 corporate and technology employees, as well as tens of thousands of jobs per hour to its network of operations. The remaining 55,000 contracts will go to locations in Canada, France, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, Germany, India and Japan, according to Amazon. The vast majority of the 55,000 hires will be for new roles the company adds, rather than covering existing positions, the company said.
The announcement came on the same day as Walmart (WMT) – Amazon’s competitor in retail and online logistics – said it wants to hire 20,000 workers for its distribution and compliance centers.
It also comes when Amazon has faced intense criticism for dealing with distribution center workers and after a failed effort to unionize one of its stores in Alabama. In June, one of the largest unions in the United States passed a resolution to undertake a broader campaign to unionize workers in the e-commerce giant’s warehouse.