Amazon’s pay raise for over 500,000 workers comes at an interesting time
Amazon has announced that over 500,000 of its workers will get a permanent increase in their hourly wages starting in mid-May, from as low as an additional 50 cents an hour to as much as three extra dollars per hour (via GeekWire). That’s a substantial chunk of its 1.3 million person workforce getting at least a small pay bump, and the company shared that it’s investing over $1 billion in these pay increases. Amazon said that it’s also on a hiring spree for “tens of thousands of jobs across our operations in the US.”
Amazon previously recognized its warehouse and delivery workers with a $2 pay bump last March as the company worked to meet increased demand during the pandemic, but that was a temporary raise that disappeared in May 2020,...