Yahoo Finance Amazon says it will create 100,000 jobs in the US
President-elect Donald Trump is going to have more US jobs to brag about.
On Thursday, Amazon (AMZN) said in a press release that it would create 100,000 full-time, full-benefit jobs in the US over the next 18 months. The company says these jobs will range from engineering and software development to entry-level fulfillment center positions. Amazon currently employs about 180,000 people in the US.
Notably, this announcement of adding jobs in the US follows commentary from the company last year that in 2016, Amazon would add 26 new fulfillment centers in the US. In its release, Amazon said, “many of the roles will be in new fulfillment centers that have been announced over the past several months.”
The company is, then, in essence re-announcing jobs it had already said it would create, which is the easiest way for a company to keep Donald Trump off its back in 2017.
“These jobs are not just in our Seattle headquarters or in Silicon Valley — they’re in our customer service network, fulfillment centers and other facilities in local communities throughout the country,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon Founder and CEO.
“We plan to add another 100,000 new Amazonians across the company over the next 18 months as we open new fulfillment centers, and continue to invent in areas like cloud technology, machine learning, and advanced logistics.”
Amazon’s announcement does not mention Trump by name, but Bezos and Trump have history and in the wake of Trump’s sporadic attacks on companies since the election, it seems Bezos wanted to get ahead of the curve.
At the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in October 2016, Bezos said that Trump’s talk during the campaign was eroding democracy.
“Trying to chill the media and threaten retribution isn’t appropriate,” said Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, which has been a consistent thorn in Trump’s side.
“We have freedom of speech in this country. It’s written in our Constitution. Except for our norms and behaviors, [the] Constitution is just a piece of paper. We are not a new democracy. It is inappropriate for a presidential candidate to erode it around the edges. They should be trying to burnish it — not erode it.”
And these comments came after a December 2015 tweet from Bezos said he would save Trump a seat on a Blue Origin rocket headed for space. Blue Origin is the privately-held rocketry company Bezos also owns.
That tweet came following pronouncements from Trump during the campaign that Amazon would have “such problems” were he to become president given Bezos’ involvement with both Amazon and The Washington Post.
Following the election, however, Bezos congratulated Trump on Twitter, writing that, “I for one give him my most open mind and wish him great success in his service to the country.”
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Myles Udland is a writer at Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter @MylesUdland
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