Amazon warehouse workers getting raises

Some Amazon employees just got a raise.Getty/Rick T. Wilking

• Some Amazon employees working in the company’s fulfillment centers have recently gotten raises, The Washington Post reported. 
• The raises were generally between 2-4% and amounted to about 25 to 55 more cents an hour.
• The raises follow a series of high-profile attacks on the retailer’s pay and treatment of its warehouse workers. 
• An Amazon spokesperson said in a statement to Business Insider that it evaluates warehouse workers’ pay annually. 

Amazon has upped its pay for some warehouse workers.

The online retail giant has instituted pay raises for workers in some of the warehouses where the company fulfills orders, The Washington Post reported on Monday. The raises ranged between 2-4% and amounted to about 25 to 55 cents more an hour on average.

Some employees, speaking anonymously with the Post, said they were unhappy with that amount.

“It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough at all,” one anonymous source said. “The HR manager in the room was like, ‘Aren’t you excited? Come on, clap!’ We started a slow clap, with no emotions on our faces. A 3 percent raise in four years — it feels like damage control.”

In a statement to Business Insider, an Amazon spokeswoman criticized the Post’s story as not “demonstrative of the experiences of the majority of our workforce” and said it “was clearly intended to sensationalize a regular employer practice.”

She said that the company often adjusts employee pay, and that the increase is part of an annual evaluation that happens every September. This year’s increase was comparable to raises given in previous years, the spokeswoman added. 

“The majority of full-time fulfillment center employees receive annual wage increases which complement the standard tenure-based pay increases and performance-based bonuses,” the spokeswoman said in a statement. “In the US, the average hourly wage for a full-time associate in our fulfillment centers, including cash, stock, and incentive bonuses, is over $15/hour before overtime. That’s in addition to our full benefits package.”

Amazon is now one of the country’s largest employers and has a large network of fulfillment centers dedicated to shipping packages to customers.

The company’s warehouse pay has become an especially hot topic in the wake of high-profile attacks from Sen. Bernie Sanders, who frequently makes an example of Amazon using news stories that describe poor working conditions and low pay.

Tweets from Sanders’ account frequently portray Amazon as one of the biggest villains of capitalism, and they often mention the company’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, who is the richest man in the world. A recurring theme of Sanders’ tweets is Bezos’ extreme wealth compared with what Amazon’s lowest-paid workers make.

Sanders has also introduced the Stop BEZOS Bill, which would impose a 100% tax on government assistance received by workers at companies with more than 500 employees.