Amazon says it will seek to hire 250,000 people for the holiday season, a significant increase from past years, citing projections for a strong holiday shopping season.
As part of the announcement Tuesday morning, the company also said it’s putting $1.3 billion into pay increases for fulfillment and transportation employees, boosting the average pay for those positions to more than $20.50 per hour, representing an increase of more than 50% over the past five years.
Amazon says the 250,000-person hiring goal for the holidays includes seasonal, full-time, and part-time workers. The number is up from a target of 150,000 last year.
Responding to an inquiry from GeekWire, an Amazon spokesperson said the company bases its seasonal hiring goals each year on numerous factors, chief among them projected customer demand. The company is staffing up for what it projects to be a strong holiday season.
The new plan suggests a return to growth mode for Amazon’s warehouses after a post-pandemic period of decline.
In advance of the holidays last year, for the second quarter of 2022, Amazon posted the largest sequential employment decline in its history, largely through attrition, after overstaffing its warehouses to handle pandemic-driven demand. The impact of that decline was felt across the company’s U.S. fulfillment and distribution network.
The company separately made a record 27,000 layoffs in its tech and corporate workforce earlier this year.
As of the end of June, Amazon’s global employment, including corporate and warehouse employees, was 1.46 million people, down 4% year-over-year.
