Amazon Hired Over 400K Workers This Year, Raising Workforce Over 50%

You, of course, already know that Amazon has surged throughout the pandemic, as the shift from retail to online shopping has accelerated even faster in 2020 than it has in previous years. Nonetheless, the scale of Amazon's growth is still staggering. As the New York Times details, Amazon added 427,300 employees between January and October. Since July, they've added nearly 2,800 employees PER DAY.

Of the 1.2 million members of the global Amazon workforce -- up over 50 percent from a year ago -- 810,000 live in the United States. However, these numbers still understate Amazon's job numbers, as there are about 500,000 Amazon delivery workers who are contractors and not direct Amazon employees.

The Times makes the case that this hiring wave is unprecedented in American history:

"Such rapid growth is unrivaled in the history of corporate America. It far outstrips the 230,000 employees that Walmart, the largest private employer with more than 2.2 million workers, added in a single year two decades ago. The closest comparisons are the hiring that entire industries carried out in wartime, such as shipbuilding during the early years of World War II or home building after soldiers returned, economists and corporate historians said. 'It’s hiring like mad,' Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said of Amazon. 'No American company has hired so many workers so quickly.'”