The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Amazon ups hourly wage to $15
Amazon, which has faced political and economic pressure to raise pay for thousands of employees, is boosting its minimum wage for all U.S. workers to $15 per hour starting next month and said it will push for an increase in the federally mandated minimum wage, which now stands at $7.25 per hour.
“We listened to our critics, thought hard about what we wanted to do, and decided we want to lead,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO.
The wage hike will go into effect as Amazon hires more than 100,000 holiday workers to pack and ship goods in its warehouses. Employers are facing the tightest job market in nearly two decades, making it more difficult to lure workers who have a lot more choices about taking a job than just a year ago.
Amazon said Tuesday that the wage hike will benefit more than 350,000 workers, which includes fulltime, part-time, temporary and seasonal positions. Employees at Whole Foods, the upscale grocery chain Amazon owns, will get the same pay hike. Amazon’s hourly operations and customer service employees, some who already make $15 per hour, will also see a wage increase, the Seattle company said.
Amazon has faced criticism from labor rights groups and others over pay and working conditions at its warehouses. One of its harshest critics is U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders. His Twitter account, which has nearly 9 million followers, frequently points out the disparity between Amazon’s median employee pay and Bezos’ vast fortune.
Sanders congratulated Bezos on Tuesday for “doing exactly the right thing.”
Despite its domination, Amazon shares one potential hurdle that is growing higher for almost all employers big and small: a tightening labor market. The unemployment rate is 3.9 percent, near an 18-year low. The most recent statistics from the U.S. Labor Department showed that in August, the pace of hiring rose again and wages grew at their fastest pace in nine years.
Average hourly pay jumped 0.4 percent in August and increased 2.9 percent compared with a year earlier. That’s the fastest annual gain since the Great Recession ended. There are now more available jobs than unemployed people, the first time that has happened in the 18 years that data on open jobs has been tracked.
As competition among companies for qualified workers grows more intense, they are increasingly willing to pay more wages.
Raising starting wages isn’t just good publicity for Amazon and other major retailers. It helps them save money that would be lost as talent leaves for higher pay elsewhere.