Amazon is mobilizing a growing army to deliver packages to your door.
My colleague Karen Weise wrote about a hiring binge at Amazon that has expanded its work force by more than 425,000 from January to October, to more than 1.2 million people, mostly in the company’s warehouses and package handling centers.
Karen said this hiring spree was unlike anything outside of industries gearing up for war, and her article included bonkers numbers on the company’s rapid employee growth. As the holiday shopping season has kicked off, mostly online, Karen spoke with me about how and why Amazon is expanding so quickly:
Shira: How did this happen? Does Amazon just need more people to handle our pandemic shopping?
Karen: A lot of it has to do with Amazon starting to shift to one-day delivery for many orders beginning last year. Promising faster deliveries means Amazon needs to store merchandise much closer to population centers, and it is opening new facilities and hiring staff for those locations at a breakneck speed.
Faster deliveries are also why there are now half a million Amazon delivery drivers, who are considered contractors and not counted in the company’s work force.
How unusual is it for a company to add more than 425,000 employees in less than a year?
Labor economists and historians I spoke with were grasping for precedents. There were times in history when a single large dominant company hired like this: Ford early in the automotive era, the old Pennsylvania Railroad and the Bell telephone companies. But this combination of speed and concentration of work force expansion is extremely unusual.
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You wrote that starting in July, Amazon brought in an average of about 2,800 new people each day? How?!
Right now, Amazon essentially does most hiring virtually. The company accepts job applications online, and then conducts online assessments with potential new hires instead of a job interview. You can get an offer without talking to anyone.
How does working at an Amazon warehouse or package center compare with other jobs?
It doesn’t compare to anything else, really.
Working at an e-commerce warehouse is more physical than working in most retail stores — and you don’t interact with customers. But it’s also not like traditional workhouse work, which usually involves moving small numbers of very large items on pallets. Working at Amazon or other e-commerce warehouses is about moving a large number of small, individual items. Average pay at Amazon warehouses is higher than a conventional retail job but lower than a traditional warehouse job.
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It’s really a new kind of work, almost like replacing the labor of a typical store customer. Instead of you walking into a store, pulling a T-shirt off a rack and taking it to a cashier to pay and driving it home, people at Amazon are effectively doing those steps.
How does the growing work force play into the questioning of Amazon’s power from politicians and regulators?
That’s not why Amazon is hiring so quickly, but it now has employees in almost every state. The work force is the most potent political message that Amazon has, and the company knows it. It sends workers to meet with their local members of Congress, and the lawmakers are given a safety vest emblazoned with the name of an Amazon warehouse in their legislative district.
The New York Times