Pushed by Pandemic, Amazon Goes on a Hiring Spree Without Equal

[Zorro]

The company has added 427,300 employees in 10 months, bringing its global work force to more than 1.2 million.

Amazon has embarked on an extraordinary hiring binge this year, vacuuming up an average of 1,400 new workers a day and solidifying its power as online shopping becomes more entrenched in the coronavirus pandemic.

The hiring has taken place at Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle, at its hundreds of warehouses in rural communities and suburbs, and in countries such as India and Italy. Amazon added 427,300 employees between January and October, pushing its work force to more than 1.2 million people globally, up more than 50 percent from a year ago. Its number of workers now approaches the entire population of Dallas.

The spree has accelerated since the onset of the pandemic, which has turbocharged Amazon’s business and made it a winner of the crisis. Starting in July, the company brought on about 350,000 employees, or 2,800 a day. Most have been warehouse workers, but Amazon has also hired software engineers and hardware specialists to power enterprises such as cloud computing, streaming entertainment and devices, which have boomed in the pandemic.

The scale of hiring is even larger than it may seem because the numbers do not account for employee churn, nor do they include the 100,000 temporary workers who have been recruited for the holiday shopping season. They also do not include what internal documents show as roughly 500,000 delivery drivers, who are contractors and not direct Amazon employees.

Such rapid growth is unrivaled in the history of corporate America. It far outstrips the 230,000 employees that Walmart, the largest private employer with more than 2.2 million workers, added in a single year two decades ago. The closest comparisons are the hiring that entire industries carried out in wartime, such as shipbuilding during the early years of World War II or home building after soldiers returned, economists and corporate historians said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/27/technology/pushed-by-pandemic-amazon-goes-on-a-hiring-spree-without-equal.html

[FBaggins]

1. I was stuck looking for the missing word at the end of the title

Read though the whole thing before I realized it was a superlative

[North Shore Chicago]

2. Unacceptable!

Why are drivers considered 'contractors?' Because Bezos does not want to pay benefits?

[cwydro]

3. Employee "churn." Is that the new cool word for turnover?

New to me.

[comradebillyboy]

4. I'm sorry I didn't buy Amazon stock back when

Bezos was just a bookseller working out of his garage. Back in Amazon's early days Bezos was ridiculed because he wasn't turning big enough profits.