Earlier today, I visited one of our sites near Salt Lake City to share some news with our teammates there—that we’re making a significant new investment in pay and benefits for the hourly front-line employees across our fulfillment and transportation network. This is part of an annual process where we review our wages and benefits to ensure that they stay competitive—and in many cases industry-leading—and I’m proud to say that this year is our biggest ever investment in our team. It’s one of the many ways that we say thank you for all the work that they do to support our customers and communities, and it was exciting to be able to share the news with hundreds of them in person.
Here are more of the details on what I shared:
Pay. In 2018, we led the industry in increasing our starting wage to $15 per hour—more than double the federal minimum wage. We’ve continued to increase it each year since then, and today we announced that hourly members of our front-line team will be getting at least an additional $1.50 per hour starting this month, which will bring their average base wage to more than $22 per hour and average total compensation to more than $29 per hour when you include the value of their elected benefits (things like health care from the first day on the job—more on this below). This is an increase of $3,000 a year on average for full-time employees who work a 40-hour week. And as one of the largest private employers in the country (we now have more than 800,000 people in these roles across the U.S.), this pay increase equals a total investment of more than $2.2 billion in our team.
Benefits. For many years, we’ve worked hard to offer one of the best benefits packages in our industry, which includes things like health care from the first day on the job (this is still too rare among companies like ours), dental coverage, a 401(k) program with a company match, flexible working hours, and even pre-paid college tuition (we think it’s better to pre-pay so our team doesn’t have to incur out of pocket costs and then get reimbursed).
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). 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.
As I told the team this morning, this is just one way to say thank you for all they do. That includes making huge progress on safety over the past five years (recordable injuries are down by 28% and lost-time injuries are down by 75% in the U.S.). Helping deliver the fastest-ever speeds for Prime members. And bringing energy and commitment to work each day and supporting each other and our communities throughout the year.
This is a pretty amazing team, that does pretty incredible things, and I feel lucky to be a part of it. If you want to meet some of our team yourself, and see what it’s really like to be behind the scenes in our buildings, I encourage you to visit us—you can sign up for a tour, and we look forward to seeing you there.
