Amazon’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, is the richest man in the world, with a net worth of about $160 billion. Today (Oct. 2), he announced that he will be raising the minimum wages for his e-commerce company’s US workers to $15 an hour, a move that will affect 250,000 full-time employees and 100,000 seasonal workers.
Amazon has been under pressure from politicians, like the Democratic senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, who highlighted the low pay of Amazon workers on his website this summer. Sanders proposed legislation entitled the Stop BEZOS Act that would have the company pay the government for every employee that works there but relies on governmental assistance. “We listened to our critics, thought hard about what we wanted to do, and decided we wanted to lead,” Bezos said in a statement. “We’re excited about this change and encourage our competitors and other large employers to join us.”
The new company minimum wage goes into effect on November 1, and will include workers who are hired through temp agencies and are not direct Amazon employees. The tech company is the second-largest employer in the US.
Next, the company says it will attempt to put pressure on the federal government to increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour. This would have a “profound impact” on tens of millions of working American families, according to Jay Carney, Amazon’s senior vice president of global corporate affairs.
Meanwhile, in the UK, Amazon has also announced raises. Almost 40,000 workers will see their pay increase to £10.50 an hour in London and £9.50 in the the rest of the country.
The pay increases in the US and UK won’t make Amazon workers rich, to be sure. But they may ease the pressure that Bezos and his company have been under increasingly, given the stark difference between his wealth and the financial difficulties his employees have said they face.