Amazon Touts Plan to Create More Than 100,000 Full-Time Jobs in U.S.
2017年1月13日 - 1:47AM
Dow Jones News
By Laura Stevens
Amazon.com Inc. on Thursday said the online retail giant plans
to create more than 100,000 full-time jobs in the U.S. by mid-2018,
becoming the latest company to promise job creation during
president-elect Donald Trump's first term.
The additional jobs would swell Amazon's U.S. workforce, which
stood at 180,000 last year. The Seattle-based company said that
many of the new jobs will be at already announced warehouses under
construction in Texas, California, Florida, New Jersey and
elsewhere.
"Innovation is one of our guiding principles at Amazon, and it's
created hundreds of thousands of American jobs," said Amazon CEO
Jeff Bezos. He added that some of the new jobs would be in areas
such as cloud technology, machine learning, and advanced
logistics.
Amazon's announcement follows a meeting last month between Mr.
Trump and Silicon Valley executives, in which he struck a
conciliatory tone after months of criticism of the companies on the
campaign trail.
During the 90-minute meeting, Mr. Trump told the 13 executives,
including Mr. Bezos, that he would work with them to foster
innovation and to support fair-trade deals. The group also
discussed job creation. Mr. Trump had accused companies including
Apple Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. during the
campaign of sending jobs overseas.
Mr. Bezos said in a statement at the time that Mr. Trump's
promised focus on innovation "would create a huge number of jobs
across the whole country, in all sectors, not just tech --
agriculture, infrastructure, manufacturing -- everywhere."
The biggest source of jobs at Amazon is its warehouses, which
process and ship orders. Amazon opened about two dozen new
warehouses in the third quarter of last year, prompting costs to
soar in part due to those investments, the company said. That
brought its total number of warehouses globally to about 150.
Over the holidays, Amazon said it hired 120,000 seasonal workers
in the U.S. and that thousands of those will stay on as the company
continues to expand.
Other roles will include engineer and software development,
created in part by Amazon's expansion into its cloud business and
other fields. However, new technology Amazon and others are
developing, such as artificial intelligence, is replacing human
workers.
Amazon also aims to handle more of its package deliveries
itself, according to people familiar with the matter, something
that could lead to indirect job growth. It said "hundreds of
thousands of jobs" could be created through programs such as its
Flex citizen-driver program, where people with a car and a
smartphone can earn up to $25 an hour delivering packages although
they aren't full-time Amazon employees.
Amazon joins a host of companies that have been announcing
thousands of new jobs to roll out under the Trump administration,
with job creation having been a key promise during Mr. Trump's
campaign. Earlier this week, Alibaba Group Holding Inc.'s Chief
Executive Jack Ma met with the president-elect and made a bold, if
vague, promise to create new U.S. jobs.
Similar to Mr. Ma's proposal, Amazon said Thursday that jobs
could be created indirectly for small sellers who offer their goods
on Amazon's marketplace.
During the campaign, Mr. Trump had accused Amazon's CEO of
buying the Washington Post to influence politics. "If I become
president, oh do they have problems," Mr. Trump said. Mr. Bezos had
been critical of Mr. Trump as well during the campaign, saying in
October that the candidate's behavior "erodes democracy around the
edges."
Amazon's share price was one of the hardest hit in the days
directly following Mr. Trump's election, tumbling 9% to as low as
about $719 before recovering.
Write to Laura Stevens at laura.stevens@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 12, 2017 11:32 ET (16:32 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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