Amazon has added 100,000 jobs over the past few weeks to support the increased orders nationwide as many people are working remotely and staying home to prevent the spread of COVID-19. But it's not stopping there; Amazon aims to add another 75,000 more jobs in the coming weeks.
Five things to know:
1. The company is adding jobs to meet customer demand and assist existing employees fulfilling orders for essential products, including masks and other equipment to hospitals. The company invested $350 million worldwide on March 13 to hire 100,000 people across its operation network to work at the company's warehouses and serve as shoppers or delivery drivers. In the past month, those jobs have filled and Amazon is adding 75,000 more positions.
2. Amazon now expects to spend more than $500 million to increase employee wages. The company previously raised rates to $15 per hour or more for employees at the ground level; they announced on April 13 that they would raise the hourly wage by $2 per hour through the end of April. The company also doubled regular hourly base pay for overtime hours worked.
3. In addition to hiring for delivery services, Amazon Web Services is investing $20 million initially in the AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative, which will support customers working on more accurate diagnostic solutions and promote collaboration between multiple organizations.
4. There are also 14,281 job opening for Amazon Web Services, which include 277 jobs for Amazon AI and 363 AWS software engineering managers. There are also 2,125 open software development engineer jobs open and 1,185 in the healthcare space including openings in healthcare informatics and a data engineer for healthcare analytics.
5. On April 8, AWS made its COVID-19 data lake available to the public to support hospitals, researchers and public health officials. Researchers can use the data lake to run analyses and develop dashboards tracking the infections and resource deployment.