Employment System

To support the buildout of its logistics infrastructure, Amazon added over 81,000 new jobs in 2018, bringing the total workforce up to 647,500 full-time and part-time employees. Amazon had a number of programs in place to attract high-quality employees. The company pre-paid 95% of tuition for employees to take courses in in-demand fields in order to help employees find long-term, fulfilling career paths. The company also adopted a policy called Pay to Quit, which offered employees between
$2,000 and $5,000 (depending on length of employment) to quit. The program was meant to encourage dissatisfied employees to leave. Amazon also began pioneering a concept called the Virtual Contact Center, which would allow employees to work from home.
In August 2015, The New York Times published an exposé on Amazon, suggesting that the company was “conducting a little-known experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers.” Employees were held to standards that Amazon itself described as “unreasonably high,” and the internal phone directory showed employees how to send confidential feedback to each other’s bosses. One ex- employee recalled, “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.” Bezos refuted the story and said Amazon would not tolerate the “shockingly callous management practices” it portrayed.
Criticisms of Amazon’s employment practices grew louder in 2018, as many decried poor working conditions in the company’s warehouses, including the failure to pay its employees a living wage. In September 2018, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced a bill in the Senate called the Stop BEZOS Act, which stood for “Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act.” The following month, Amazon received more positive press coverage, when the company announced that it would raise its minimum wage for all US employees – including part-time and seasonal employees – to $15 per hour.