Amazon says it will hire another 100,000 seasonal workers this year, bolstering its fulfilment and distribution operations for a holiday season like no other, as a new wave of COVID-19 cases surges across the country.
That’s half as many seasonal positions as the company created for the 2019 holiday shopping season. However, it comes after an unprecedented hiring spree this year. Amazon brought on 175,000 seasonal workers starting in March and April as the first stage of the pandemic confined many people to their homes. The company later converted 125,000 of those jobs into regular, full-time positions. Separately, Amazon said last month that it was hiring 100,000 full- and part-time operations employees in the U.S. and Canada.
Amazon’s total number of employees and seasonal workers topped 1 million for the first time in the quarter ended June 30. The company will report its latest jobs numbers with its earnings on Thursday afternoon.
The company saw its profits soar in the first half of this year, even as it spent billions on COVID-19 initiatives. Amazon said earlier this month that more than 19,000 workers had tested positive or been presumed positive for COVID-19, which the company described as lower than the rate of positive cases in the general population.
Amazon’s hiring surge comes amid increasing scrutiny of its operations. A report in September by Reveal, a publication of the Center for Investigative Reporting, cited internal company records showing that Amazon has underreported the injury rates at warehouses, particularly those with robotics. Amazon disputes details of the report.
The company said this morning that it has promoted 35,000 operations employees this year. (Last year, by comparison, the company said it promoted 19,000 operations workers to manager or supervisor roles.) In addition, the company said a total of 30,000 of employees have now taken part in its Career Choice retraining program, which launched in 2012.
