Jobs In Canada: Amazon Hire 15,000 Workers

Amazon Canada will hire 15,000 new warehouse and delivery workers in communities across the country to support ongoing expansion plans in Canada, the e-commerce giant said on Monday.

Amazon also announced that it will increase the starting salary for its front-line, hourly employees in Canada to between $17 per hour and $21.65 per hour, which is higher than its current starting salary of about $16 per hour. Is.

Existing employees will also receive an additional $1.60 to $2.20 an hour, starting immediately, Amazon said, regardless of how long they’ve been with the company.

“We are growing very fast in the country,” Sumegha Kumar, director of Canadian customer fulfillment operations for Amazon Canada, said in an interview.

“Our business is expanding a lot, and we want to continue to focus on our customers, so we clearly need to keep hiring and retaining top talent.”

Amazon Hire 15,000 Workers

Amazon Canada currently has 25,000 full-time and part-time employees in 25 communities across five provinces. The company is growing rapidly due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting boom in online shopping. Amazon now has 46 warehouse, logistics and distribution facilities in Canada, compared to 30 in mid-2020. According to the company, more development announcements are expected later this year.

Amazon’s expansion plans come amid significant labor shortages in some sectors of the economy. According to Statistics Canada, the country added 90,200 jobs in August, bringing the unemployment rate to 7.1 percent – the lowest level since the start of the pandemic last year.

But not all those jobs are being filled. Mr. Thanabalasingam, the senior economist at TD, said on Friday that labor supply is out of sync with strong demand for workers in high-touch industries such as retail and foodservice, and is resulting in staff shortages.

“Career changes and ongoing health concerns could be potential reasons for the lack of available workers,” he said.

Kumar declined to say whether Amazon is facing labor shortages in Canada, though he acknowledged that “there are some places where we have more opportunities than others” to fill vacancies. He added that raising salaries is one way to ensure the company remains competitive.

“We will always continue to watch how our market is progressing and make the necessary investments in our compensation structure,” she said.

Earlier this year, Amazon announced that it was launching its new U.S. Will increase the wage for the U.S. to $17 an hour, as it seeks to add 75,000 new workers to that country.

Jobs In Canada: Amazon Hire 15,000 Workers

Other companies south of the border, including McDonald’s, Costco, and Walmart, have also raised wages to attract more applicants and ease pandemic restrictions with a flood of customers.

Don Drummond, an economist at the School of Policy Studies at Queens University in Kingston, Ont., said these employers have no choice but to raise wages. Not only has the risk of catching COVID at work made people reluctant to work for minimum wage, but the pool of potential employees is smaller due to border restrictions and the decline in international migration during the pandemic.

“A disproportionate supplier of these low-paying jobs are recent immigrants. And that has basically gone down to zero in the last 18 months,” he said.

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Drummond said employers struggling with labor shortages need to not only improve their basic pay but also to offer benefits such as health and dental coverage for hourly workers.

“Because that’s a lot of what you hear from workers,” he said. “It’s not just that wages are really low, it’s that a lot of employers in that minimum wage group have taken away a lot of the benefits they once had.”

Amazon says it provides access to health, dental and vision benefits as well as training and education programs to all employees regardless of their position or tenure.

Amazon is also offering a $100 bonus for new and current employees who show proof of COVID-19 vaccination. The company experienced virus outbreaks at many of its facilities throughout the pandemic.

Amazon has not made vaccination mandatory for its employees.