Amazon Plans To Hire 2,000 Extra U.K. Staff And Bring Total U.K. Workforce To 29,500

Amazon is planning to hire 2,000 additional staff in the U.K. in 2019, bringing its total workforce in the country to more than 29,500.

The Seattle-headquartered e-commerce heavyweight said in a press release on Wednesday that a wide range of roles will be created, with jobs being created across the U.K. in “head office, R&D, Amazon Web Services, and Operations.”

The news was welcomed by U.K. Chancellor Philip Hammond, who said: “This government is supporting business to create the high-skilled, high-paid jobs of the future, and these roles will benefit people across the U.K.”

But in reality, the majority of the new roles will be low-skilled and low-paid jobs in vast warehouses, or fulfillment centers, as Amazon calls them.

Amazon has a network of 17 fulfillment centres in the U.K. that stock thousands of products sold on the Amazon platform.

Of the 2,000 new recruits, just 170 will be tasked with building new technologies for Amazon.

An Amazon spokesperson refused to tell Forbes exactly how many of the 2,000 jobs will be warehouse jobs, but they did concede that the majority will be in Amazon’s “fulfillment network.”

Workers inside Jeff Bezos’ aircraft hangar-sized warehouses face challenging conditions.

Journalist James Bloodworth, who went undercover as an Amazon worker for his book, Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain, found that some Amazon warehouse workers skip toilet breaks and urinate in bottles in order to meet stringent quotas and monitoring.

Bloodworth told The Sun newspaper that the Staffordshire warehouse he worked in resembled a prison.

Amazon is slowly introducing automated packing and sorting robots into its warehouses, but it still relies on a large number of humans at present.

At the end of 2018, Amazon’s global workforce stood at a colossal 647,500, with 83,000 of those located in Europe.

Due to the nature of its business, it employs far more staff than other U.S. tech giants like Google and Facebook.

By comparison, Facebook had 37,700 employees worldwide as of March 2019.

At the end of 2018, it had 2,300 people in the U.K., but that figure is expected to increase to 3,000 this year.