Amazon raises hourly wages for fulfillment, transportation workers

Amazon said in a blog post that hourly members of its front-line team will be getting at least an additional $1.50/hour starting this month, which will bring their average base wage to more than $22/hour and average total compensation to more than $29/hour when you include the value of their elected benefits. This is an increase of $3,000 a year on average for full-time employees who work a 40-hour week. This pay increase equals a total investment of more than $2.2B in the team, the company said. “Throughout each year, we listen to our teams’ feedback and make adjustments to our benefits-from little (but important) things like offering scheduling flexibility when life happens with Unpaid Personal Time (UPT) that employees accrue, to bigger network-wide things like adding new features to our pre-paid education program, which we call Career Choice (you can read more about that program),” Amazon said. “Recently, we heard from employees that they love taking language classes through Career Choice, but that they didn’t like waiting for a few months before they were eligible (those classes were only offered after 90 days). So today we changed that-we’ll now let our team enroll in language classes from day one. It may seem like a small change, but we’re making hundreds of changes like that throughout each year-at the individual site level and across our network-based on the feedback we hear from our team. And we’re proud to do it. We also added another much-loved item to our benefits package-Prime. Our front-line team members across our operations are a big part in bringing the magic of Prime to customers, and starting early next year, Prime will become part of their benefits package. Hourly team members in the U.S. will get Prime at no additional cost for as long as they are a part of the Amazon team.”