The federal minimum wage in the U.S. is too low and should be raised. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 and has not increased since 2009. Raising the minimum wage would have a profound impact on the lives of tens of millions of individuals and families across the nation and help address growing income inequality. We pay a starting wage of at least $15 an hour to all full-time, part-time, temporary, and seasonal employees across the U.S., with an average of over $20.50 across the country. This is on top of industry-leading, comprehensive benefits for employees. We are using our position as one of the nation’s largest employers to encourage other companies to raise their wages and to lobby members of Congress and state legislatures to raise the minimum wage.
Our Positions
We created this page to provide customers, investors, policymakers, employees, and others our views on certain issues. While our positions are carefully considered and deeply held, there is much room for healthy debate and differing opinions. We hope being clear about our positions is helpful.
Human-induced climate change is real and serious, and action is needed from the public and private sectors. The overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree that human activities have been contributing to climate-warming trends over the past century. Most leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position. We agree and have created The Climate Pledge—a commitment to reach the Paris Agreement 10 years early. We are innovating and investing to be net-zero carbon by 2040 and run on 100% renewable energy by 2025. We purchased 100,000 fully electric delivery vehicles, the largest order ever for electric delivery vehicles, and we are investing over $1B in nature-based climate solutions and reforestation projects around the world to begin removing carbon from the atmosphere now. Our sustainability website provides comprehensive reporting on our carbon footprint and progress on our commitments.
The energy industry should have access to the same technologies as other industries. We will continue to provide cloud services to companies in the energy industry to make their legacy businesses less carbon intensive and help them accelerate development of renewable energy businesses. We support sustainability programs for our own business, and we work with partners to reduce their demand for carbon fuel sources.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion are good for business—and more fundamentally, they're simply right. Customers represent a wide array of genders, races, ethnicities, abilities, ages, religions, sexual orientations, military status, backgrounds, and political views. It’s critical that Amazon employees are also diverse and that we foster a culture where inclusion is the norm. Amazon prioritizes equal pay, and since we’ve been measuring and publishing the ratio over the past several years, women have earned between 99.8 and 100.0 cents for every dollar that men have earned in the same jobs. We also believe it's critical that we increase opportunity for underrepresented groups to enter the technology workforce. We created Amazon Future Engineer, a childhood-to-career computer science education program designed to inspire and educate millions of students globally from underserved communities to pursue careers in computer science. It's not only that diversity, equity, and inclusion are good for business—it's more fundamental than that. It's simply right.
The inequitable treatment of Black people is unacceptable. We stand in solidarity with our Black employees, customers, and partners, and we are committed to helping build a country and a world where everyone can live with dignity and free from fear. We support legislation to combat misconduct and racial bias in policing, efforts to protect and expand voting rights, and initiatives that provide better health and educational outcomes for Black people.
The rights of LGBTQ+ people must be protected. We were early and strong supporters of marriage equality and will continue to advocate for protections and equal rights for transgender people. We stand together with the LGBTQ community and are working at the U.S. federal and state level on legislation, including supporting passage of the Equality Act. Amazon provides gender transition benefits based on the Standards of Care published by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH).
We strongly support the rights of immigrants and immigration reform. Amazon believes the U.S. should welcome the best and the brightest talent from around the world. It's imperative for our country's competitiveness. Amazon has hundreds of thousands of employees in the U.S. from all backgrounds who are dedicated to inventing on behalf of and serving our customers. We support our refugee and humanitarian-based immigrant population through our Welcome Door program, which provides new immigration resources and support, because we recognize the challenges they face in the U.S. We support and lobby for immigration reform, including a legal pathway to citizenship for Dreamers and reforms to the green card and high-skilled visa programs.
All people should have access to housing they can afford. Low-income and minority families are disproportionately affected by an affordable housing shortage in the U.S. While only governments at the local, state, and federal level have the capacity to implement more effective housing policies, we believe the private and public sectors can work together to address this challenge. We will use our position as a large employer to support innovative housing affordability initiatives. And, in locations where we have a sizeable presence, we will invest directly in efforts where we believe our financial support will make a difference.
Governments at all levels—federal, state, and local—should have access to the best technology. Harnessing the capabilities of advanced technology such as the cloud and machine learning are important to the ongoing safety and security of the country, its citizens, our communities, and the world. We will continue to provide U.S. government and public safety agencies access to the most advanced technology and other commercial innovations.
Governments should work quickly to put in place effective regulatory frameworks and guardrails for facial recognition technology. Facial recognition technology is already solving some complex problems. For example, Amazon Rekognition has helped locate hundreds of missing children and identify thousands of child sex trafficking victims. Like most technology, facial recognition is two-sided, meaning it can also be misused. We provide guidance to all Rekognition customers, including law enforcement customers, on the technology's proper use, and we have a clear Acceptable Use Policy. However, we think that governments and lawmakers should act to regulate the use of this technology to ensure it's used appropriately. We have proposed guidelines for effective regulatory frameworks and guardrails that would protect individual civil rights and ensures that governments are transparent in their application of the technology. On June 10, 2020, we announced a one-year moratorium on police use of Amazon's facial recognition technology in the hope that this would give lawmakers around the world, including the U.S. Congress, time to implement appropriate rules, and we stand ready to help if requested.
Counterfeiters should receive stronger penalties under federal law. Counterfeit is one of the few crimes specifically prohibited by the U.S. Constitution, yet bad actors are undeterred and continue to push their products through online and physical stores, harming both consumers and the retail companies that serve them. In 2022, Amazon invested over $1.2 billion and had more than 15,000 employees fighting fraud and abuse, including counterfeit. Over the last three years, our actions decreased bad actor account creation attempts from 6 million in 2020 to 2.5 million in 2021 and, finally, 800,000 in 2022. Amazon supports and lobbies for U.S. federal policies that make intellectual property violations crimes with meaningful penalties, and for law enforcement to have resources to appropriately prosecute these crimes. We also support a requirement that every package imported into the U.S. clearly identify the person or entity responsible for shipping the product. To learn more, visit Trustworthy Shopping at Amazon.
Consumer data privacy should be protected under federal law. We have built privacy into our services from the ground up, and we never sell our customers' personal data. Many core features of the customer experience at Amazon depend on us using data responsibly and transparently. Our customer-centric approach has led us to follow privacy-by-design principles since our founding. We disclose in our privacy notice the types of data we collect and the limited circumstances in which we share customer data with third parties. We support U.S. federal privacy legislation that requires transparency, access to one's own personal information, and the ability to delete personal information, and prohibits the sale of personal data without consent. In the absence of congressional action, we support well-crafted state laws that protect consumers' privacy, while continuing to allow for innovation.
Corporate tax codes in any country should incentivize investment in the economy and job creation. In addition, tax codes, particularly between countries, should be coordinated to have neither loopholes that permit artificially lower tax rates, nor overlaps that cause higher tax rates or redundant taxation. Both distort company behavior in ways that don't benefit consumers or the economy. We support the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and its work with global governments to review the international tax system and secure consensus on these points.
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