Amazon is increasing compensation rates for most jobs globally and doubling the maximum base salary it pays employees.
Amazon is increasing the compensation rates of most of its jobs globally in a bid to retain staff in a competitive market.
That’s according to an internal memo seen by Bloomberg, which also said the company will change the timing of its stock awards to align with promotions.
The memo revealed that Amazon is planning to double the maximum base salary it pays employees to $350,000 from $160,000. However, the company declined to say how many staff would benefit.
GeekWire, which also saw the internal memo, reports that pay increases will be directed at corporate and tech workers that the tech giant is eager to retain.
“This past year has seen a particularly competitive labour market, and in doing a thorough analysis of various options, weighing the economics of our business and the need to remain competitive for attracting and retaining top talent, we decided to make meaningfully bigger increases to our compensation levels than we do in a typical year,” the company told staff.
The tech giant added it would be “increasing overall compensation ranges for most jobs globally, and the increases are much more considerable than we’ve done in the past”.
According to GeekWire, Amazon did not provide an estimate for the increase in its total compensation expenses expected to result from the newly announced salary boost. It said in the memo that compensation is “unique for each employee” and “total compensation ranges will affect every employee differently”.
According to a report by Business Insider at the end of last year, Amazon was considering compensation changes. This was in response to earlier reports that there was high turnover among corporate staff in the lead-up to major leadership changes at the company last year.
Andy Jassy, head of Amazon Web Services, succeeded company founder Jeff Bezos as CEO in the third quarter of 2021.
Amazon, which reported $469bn in revenue last year, directly employs more than 1.3m people around the world.
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