Amazon Holds National Job Fair, Looking For 50,000 Workers

The e-commerce behemoth Amazon is so keen to fill 50,000 open jobs that it’s holding a series of job fairs across the country. Most of those jobs are in its warehouses and sortation centers, and the problem Amazon is encountering is that the labor market for people who work in warehouses is becoming very competitive.

That’s because shipping centers for big e-commerce operations tend to cluster in the same areas, near airports, major highways, and with easy access to shipping hubs. In many of these areas, Amazon is planning to hold job fairs next week, with on-the-spot hiring for qualified candidates. The pay varies by region, but warehouse positions are generally full-time.

At the beginning this year, Amazon announced plans to hire more than 100,000 people in the United States, with a target date of a year from now. Out of the 50,000 jobs that it’s looking to fill now, 40,000 of them are in warehouses, choosing and packing your orders with the help of shelves mounted on very graceful robots. Most of the rest are part-time jobs in the company’s sortation centers.

“The workers that used to work in the retail stores, now we need those same workers in warehouses,” Brian Devine of ProLogistix, a staffing company in the logistics business, told the WSJ.

Now unemployment rates are plummeting near those warehouses, and the industry is starting to worry about finding enough workers to keep the places going once the holiday shopping season begins.