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Amazon Looks to Hire 30,000 Part-Time Employees in US (fortune.com)
Amazon's hiring spree is in full force. From a report: The online retailer on Thursday announced plans to hire 30,000 part-time workers in the U.S. over the next year, including 5,000 positions that will allow employees to work from home as customer service representatives. Amazon's incoming part-time employees will work 20 or more hours and receive benefits. About 25,000 of the positions Amazon has floated will work in the company's sorting and fulfillment centers, a nod to the company's plans to boost the number of logistics facilities across the U.S. in the coming years. According to Amazon, all of its part-time workers are eligible for a Career Choice program that pre-pays 95 percent of an employee's tuition if he or she is working in fields that Amazon says are "in demand."
Sears actually put in a financial statement a couple weeks ago that they don't feel confident they're going to make it. Macy's is on the way out as well. This is a shift I never thought I'd see and it seems to be happening at an extremely fast pace. Given how bad the reports are on how Amazon is as an employer, I'm assuming they're just preparing to hire a bunch of desperate people suddenly thrown out of their jobs and willing to take anything.
I guess it's OK that they're hiring 30,000 part-timers, but the reality is that people who have gone beyond the college or high school student phase of their lives need full time work with benefits. Also, a lot of these jobs are probably in their "fulfillment centers" where people are working like robots in warehouses, while Amazon figures out how to replace them with actual robots.
No matter how many gig economy jobs you string together, nothing is going to make life easy for a family whose workers are only working part time and have no benefits. It's like we haven't learned anything in the last 100 years since the Gilded Age was put to bed. This rapidly accelerating destruction of retail is probably just the first wave of what will be an extended period of massive unemployment. We had better figure out something for all these people to do quickly, or give them a basic income and call it a day. Otherwise the guillotines are going to make a comeback...