Amazon: A constant churn of hourly workers

Amazon has burned through so many workers that executives fear they are running out of prospects, said Jodi Kantor in The New York Times. The e-commerce giant is “on pace to become the nation’s largest private employer within a year or two.” But the numbers mask that “many workers cycled out of Amazon within months or even days.” In 2019, Amazon hired more than 770,000 hourly workers but reported that it had only grown by 150,000, meaning “roughly 620,000 people left and were replaced.” The churn is partly by design: Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, never wanted “hourly workers to stick around for long, viewing a ‘large, disgruntled’ workforce as a threat.”