Tried hard not to break the @NYTimes style guide & use words like "historic" and "unprecedented" in this piece on Amazon's hiring binge.
Historians and labor economists say the closest equivalent the hiring of entire industries carried out in wartime 1/ nytimes.com/2020/11/27/tec…
Historians and labor economists say the closest equivalent the hiring of entire industries carried out in wartime 1/ nytimes.com/2020/11/27/tec…
A scoop tucked in here that on top of its 1.2+ million employees, internal documents show that Amazon now has about 500,000 delivery drivers, who are contractors not its direct employees. (These are Flex/gig workers and DSP drivers) 2/
As @NelsonLichtens1 pointed out, earlier booms like WWII shipbuilding benefitted from government spending. This time, Amazon (& ecommerce broadly) benefitted from the $2 trillion stimulus that let local governments shut down traditional retail stores to reduce covid spread 3/
As @JedKolko said, the pandemic downturn has differed from past recessions, when usually all industries slowed, bc now "is also about a pretty dramatic shift of economic activity from some sectors to others" 4/
That means, as @EDerenoncourt said, Amazon is hiring now "in the context of an unprecedented loss of jobs elsewhere in the economy." 5/
Amazon's Ardine Williams said because some of the hiring growth was planned before the pandemic, when covid accelerated customer demand, Amazon could ramp up so quickly 6/
I could keep tweeting little bits, but instead, please read how Amazon's workforce is now almost the size of Dallas. 7/7 nytimes.com/2020/11/27/tec…
One more! Amazon puts its warehouses all over to be close to customers, but as @margaretomara said, having employees in many districts gives them political leverage amid greater scrutiny 8/8 nytimes.com/2020/11/27/tec…
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