Amazon looking to hire 55,000 people worldwide

Amazon is going on another hiring spree, saying it plans to recruit 55,000 people around the world.

The company said all the open roles were for tech jobs and corporate positions. Separately, Amazon has been hiring thousands of warehouse workers to pack and ship online orders.

While other companies have laid off workers during the pandemic, Amazon’s workforce has ballooned as more people stayed at home and ordered household essentials from the shopping site. Last year alone, it hired 500,000 people.

Amazon currently employs more than 1.3 million worldwide, making it the second-largest private US employer after retail rival Walmart, which is also ramping up recruitment. The company said on Wednesday that it planned to hire 20,000 people at its Walmart and Sam’s Club warehouses.

Like Walmart before it, Amazon continues to face pressure about how it treats its workers.

A union push at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama failed earlier this year, but other unions and advocates still have the company in its sights.

The Teamsters, one of the country’s largest unions, said in June that it would step up its efforts to unionise Amazon workers, saying that the company exploited employees by paying them low wages, pushed them to work at fast speeds and offered no job security.

Amazon said on Wednesday that the large number of job openings was due to its growing businesses, including its cloud computing unit and its project to send satellites into space to beam internet service to Earth.

The Seattle-based company said about 40,000 of the positions announced would be in the US and spread across 220 Amazon locations around the country.