To meet the demand for holiday orders, and surely to avoid any delivery issues that occurred last Christmas season, Amazon.com plans to hire 80,000 seasonal workers in the United States this holiday season, up 14 percent from a year ago.
The employees will have temporary jobs at Amazon’s more than 50 U.S. warehouses.
The company will also place some seasonal hires at its newly created “sortation” centers, where Amazon collects parcels from the fulfillment centers to sort them by ZIP codes for delivery to local post offices. Amazon now operates eight sortation centers in the United States. It has announced five other sites, and plans to have 15 by the end of the year.
It’s likely Amazon will also add tens of thousands of additional seasonal employees at its warehouses abroad in coming weeks.
So far this year, Amazon said it has converted more than 10,000 seasonal employees to full-time staff. And Mike Roth, Amazon’s vice president of North America operations, said that the company is “looking forward to converting thousands more … after this holiday season.”
As of June 30, Amazon had 132,600 full-time and part-time workers, not including seasonal staff.
