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Businesses The Almighty Buck

Amazon Looks to Hire 30,000 Part-Time Employees in US (fortune.com) 95

Amazon's hiring spree is in full force. From a report: The online retailer on Thursday announced plans to hire 30,000 part-time workers in the U.S. over the next year, including 5,000 positions that will allow employees to work from home as customer service representatives. Amazon's incoming part-time employees will work 20 or more hours and receive benefits. About 25,000 of the positions Amazon has floated will work in the company's sorting and fulfillment centers, a nod to the company's plans to boost the number of logistics facilities across the U.S. in the coming years. According to Amazon, all of its part-time workers are eligible for a Career Choice program that pre-pays 95 percent of an employee's tuition if he or she is working in fields that Amazon says are "in demand."
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Amazon Looks to Hire 30,000 Part-Time Employees in US

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  • by ranton ( 36917 ) on Thursday April 06, 2017 @02:02PM (#54186469)

    Amazon Looks to Hire 30,000 Part-Time Employees in US

    In other news, 300,000 US customer service workers lose their jobs because of competition with Amazon. But I'm sure our economy will create new and better jobs for them, so this is good news for them.

    • In other news, 300,000 US customer service workers lose their jobs because of competition with Amazon.

      Maybe the government should pay them to break windows [wikipedia.org] to generate jobs for glaziers.

      • >> Maybe the government should pay them to break windows [wikipedia.org] to generate jobs for glaziers.

        Or, we could create an easy-entry, revolving-door justice system to generate jobs for prison guards, social workers, attorneys, etc.
      • Maybe the government should pay them to break windows to generate jobs for glaziers.

        Trump is working on that one.

        http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/CoverStory-Blitt-Trump-Golf-1200x630-1490910856.jpg [newyorker.com]

        • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

          "I have the best job-creating chaos! Nobody knows chaos better than me. I'm a Yuuuuge fan of chaos. Beautiful plentiful chaos. There will be so much job-creating chaos that people will be screaming, Don, stop the jobs, stop the jobs, too many. Make America Chaotic Again!"

  • by PeeAitchPee ( 712652 ) on Thursday April 06, 2017 @02:09PM (#54186533)
    They are doing this to cut their expenses. I understand why small businesses might need to do it, but close this loophole for big ultraprofitable megacorps like Amazon. Also quit allowing them to stash their profits overseas and avoid paying tax. This should be a bipartisan effort, and any politician opposed to it should be voted out of office.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      No healthcare matching, no retirement. Just a job.

      • No healthcare matching, no retirement. Just a job.

        There is no logical reason that either your healthcare or your pension should come from your employer.

        In Maoist China, each factory ran a school for the children of their workers. So if you changed jobs, your kids would have to switch to a different school. That was a stupid system, but asking your employer to make your healthcare decisions for you is just as stupid, and you only think it makes sense because you are used to it.

      • You know the article says that these part time employees will receive benefits, right? Now, what benefits, I have no idea, but benefits usually mean some kind of health insurance, retirement, and the like.

      • No healthcare matching, no retirement. Just a job.

        Pretty sure they are paying social security tax like the rest of us. How is that not retirement?

        Not to mention they could always save something to retire on...

        Why does every job have to come with extra benefits? What is wrong with people working a much more relaxed schedule, which may mean a vastly higher quality of life than a 40+ (really 60) hour a week job?

    • They are doing this to cut their expenses. I understand why small businesses might need to do it, but close this loophole for big ultraprofitable megacorps like Amazon. Also quit allowing them to stash their profits overseas and avoid paying tax. This should be a bipartisan effort, and any politician opposed to it should be voted out of office.

      Or...they don't have to pay for health insurance for part time employees. So they cut expenses by offering double the part time jobs in their rotation. They opened a warehouse a few miles from where I live and they only hire part time.

  • announced plans to hire 30,000 part-time workers in the U.S. over the next year, including 5,000 positions that will allow employees to work from home as customer service representatives. Amazon's incoming part-time employees will work 20 or more hours and receive benefits. About 25,000 of the positions Amazon has floated will work in the company's sorting and fulfillment centers...

    So they're only hiring 5K work-from-home CS positions, the rest of these are just an expansion of their horrible warehouse positions. Aren't they always taking applications for those jobs?

  • Hey I agree that part time jobs are better than no jobs but they are no match for full time.
  • by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Thursday April 06, 2017 @02:39PM (#54186677)

    Sears actually put in a financial statement a couple weeks ago that they don't feel confident they're going to make it. Macy's is on the way out as well. This is a shift I never thought I'd see and it seems to be happening at an extremely fast pace. Given how bad the reports are on how Amazon is as an employer, I'm assuming they're just preparing to hire a bunch of desperate people suddenly thrown out of their jobs and willing to take anything.

    I guess it's OK that they're hiring 30,000 part-timers, but the reality is that people who have gone beyond the college or high school student phase of their lives need full time work with benefits. Also, a lot of these jobs are probably in their "fulfillment centers" where people are working like robots in warehouses, while Amazon figures out how to replace them with actual robots.

    No matter how many gig economy jobs you string together, nothing is going to make life easy for a family whose workers are only working part time and have no benefits. It's like we haven't learned anything in the last 100 years since the Gilded Age was put to bed. This rapidly accelerating destruction of retail is probably just the first wave of what will be an extended period of massive unemployment. We had better figure out something for all these people to do quickly, or give them a basic income and call it a day. Otherwise the guillotines are going to make a comeback...

    • by xxxJonBoyxxx ( 565205 ) on Thursday April 06, 2017 @02:49PM (#54186761)
      >> Otherwise the guillotines are going to make a comeback...

      You don't think Trump's election over the Marie Antoinette of our time was a shot across that bow?
    • Sears actually put in a financial statement a couple weeks ago that they don't feel confident they're going to make it. Macy's is on the way out as well. This is a shift I never thought I'd see and it seems to be happening at an extremely fast pace.

      While I can't speak to Macy's - Sears has been dying for a very long time, since the early 90's at least. (Long story short, as retail trends have shifted - Sears has been coasting on reputation.) Amazon may have accelerated their demise, but the writing has be

  • These are "box thrower" positions, and not technical.
  • Work from home, make 80K a month. I get those mails all the time. This time they tried to make it look like a press release from Amazon. The editors seem to have fallen for it.
  • I say that sincerely.

    Other people are complaining because these are part time jobs - but if Hillary were president Amazon would be layout off 30k workers, not hiring new ones, in addition to all the traditional retail job loss that would have been accelerating even faster.

    Some jobs are better than no jobs.

    • Wow, you can see into alternate time lines!

      If Hillary were president Amazon would be layout off 30k workers

      By the way, nice sentence structure there.

      I'm curious. Since you have this phenomenal ability to know the outcome of events that did not occur, why are you wasting your time posting on Slashdot? Since truth is stranger then fiction, you should be taking note of fantastic events in lots of other time lines and turning them into movies scripts, comics, fiction, etc. You could be rich and famous!

      Heck

  • This is interesting. Work-from-home CS jobs aren't a new thing, but aren't widely deployed either. It can be tough to monitor remote workers, although phone calls have a lot of good metrics associated with them that are easier than some tasks. The rest are part-time warehouse positions, which are fine for what they are, but aren't breaking new ground just expanding what they already have.

    I'd really love to see some more corporate knowledge worker roles be able to move part-time, though. I work for a good em

  • by Bodhammer ( 559311 ) on Thursday April 06, 2017 @04:37PM (#54187535)
    I'm getting headhunted by Amazon. Is it a good place to work or not?
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Um, if you don't know Amazon's reputation in the workforce, you probably don't want to be working there. It's a meat grinder environment. If you can survive political infighting, don't mind being thrown to the wolves and you'll never know it, and want to have no other life than being an Amazon employee, go for it. If you want to work in a sane environment, for a little less money, someplace else would probably be better for you.

  • This was about Amazon, wasn't it?

    Following the links, it seems they pay ~12/hour in California for laborers. No work-at-home listings were found. You might gross $1K/month. It could be a step up for an Uber driver. But there is a cost that all job hunters pay: you give up privacy big time. They can do anything they want with your data, including altering it, now and forever; here in the words of Amazon:

    "1. are acknowledging that you have read the job description for the position you are applying for and tha

  • Hmmmm . . . OK, so it's NOT the premium job everybody dreams of - it STILL pays a (sub) standard wage, and it DOES provide some extra income - and it CAN supplement a retirement income for someone that is bored stiff.
    Get a grip - even slave-wagers can provide extra help for the terminally unemployable retired community.
    I am NOT advocating this type of employment as a general standard of living, but it DOES provide some of us (disabled, retired, bored, looking for some extra income) with a bit of extra help

  • I know someone who ran out of other options and started working in an Amazon fulfillment center. It was brutal.

    The location was in San Bernadino California. The climate sucked. They had to work long hours with uncertain shifts, so planning life was impossible. The pay was so low that if you didn't live in the area you could not afford a motel. Renting a room was not an option because the work was irregular. People ended up trying to sleep in their cars, but the cops would drive around and roust anyone sle

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