Amazon to pay $15 an hour to all USA employees

Sanders said Amazon’s efforts were likely to have “a ripple effect all over the economy” by putting pressure on competitors to follow suit.

Bureau of Labor Statistics show ordinary workers in the USA private non-farm sector on average earn $22.73 an hour.

California announced in October 2017 it would raise the minimum wage to $15 by 2023.

Amazon says the new rate will go into effect on November 1, covering all of its full-time, part-time, temporary and seasonal employees in the U.S. It will climb to $13 in July 2019. The Illinois minimum wage is $8.25 an hour.

Workers hired by temp agencies on behalf of Amazon will also be included, as will anyone working for any of Amazon’s subsidiaries, such as Whole Foods.

The company reacted angrily in August to a campaign from Bernie Sanders, the USA senator from Vermont and former presidential candidate, who has been singling out Amazon for what he says are poor working conditions and wages for company warehouse employees. Amazon executives also said they would push for a raise of the federal minimum wage. Amazon says the $15 minimum wage will benefit more than 250,000 Amazon employees, plus 100,000 seasonal workers. And in that time, the rate “has lost about 9.6 percent of its purchasing power to inflation”, the Pew Research Center said previous year. That’s the fastest annual gain since the Great Recession ended. Amazon employs over 575,000 people worldwide. Despite its dominance, it shares a major problem with employers big and small: a tight labor market.

“This is really all about the future of our approach to pay for our employees and trying to lead on this issue overall”, he said.

“Jeff Bezos has become much more wealthy over the past decade, but his workers haven’t”, she said.

Pay for workers at Amazon can vary by location. About 2,000 of those are in the Houston area, according to a company spokeswoman.

Amazon, which became the second company to cross $1 trillion market value last month, on average paid employees $34,123 a year ago in the United States.

The announcement was enough to soothe one of Amazon’s fiercest critics: Sen.

The wage hikes come amid a range of criticism of the company, whose CEO Jeff Bezos is the richest person in the world.

But corporate profits in the USA are booming, and that wealth isn’t being spread out almost fast enough for many.

“This will impact more than 37,000 employees across the country, resulting in higher pay for them and their families”. The online giant is the country’s second-largest private employer, behind Walmart. Several states and cities have also passed laws increasing their minimum wages. The mean hourly wage for non-management workers in transportation and warehousing is $21.94.