Amazon plans a return to the office with 3,500 new jobs
Amazon is planning for a large-scale return to office work by hiring 3,500 corporate staff and expanding its physical offices in six US cities.
The new roles will be spread out across the retail giant's offices in New York, Phoenix, San Diego, Denver, Detroit and Dallas. In total, 900,000 square feet of new office-space has been purchased.
Two thousand of the new jobs will be based at the company’s new Fifth Avenue office in New York, which Amazon reportedly purchased from the parent company of desk rental business WeWork for more than $1bn (£759m).
The move comes after Amazon - which has seen gains in revenue during the pandemic from its e-commerce and cloud computing operations - said it would make permanent 125,000 of the 175,000 jobs it added since the start of the public health crisis.
The company said it is allowing its employees to work from home until January 8th and has signalled that it sees employees working from offices to be an important part of the business in the future.
"People from all walks of life come to Amazon to develop their careers - from recent graduates looking for a place to turn their ideas into high-impact products, to veterans accessing new jobs in cloud computing thanks to our upskilling programs," said Beth Galetti, senior vice president of human resources at Amazon.
"These 3,500 new jobs will be in cities across the country with strong and diverse talent pools. We look forward to helping these communities grow their emerging tech workforce."
The e-commerce giant’s plans put it at odds with businesses such as Google and Twitter which have scaled back requirements for employees to work in offices.
Google has told staff that they will not have to return to their offices until July 2021 at the earliest.
Twitter announced in May that it would allow most employees to work from home permanently following the coronavirus pandemic.
Amazon has emerged as the biggest winner during lockdown, last month revealing its profits had more than doubled to $5.2bn (£3.95bn) in the three months to the end of June.
Its expansion has attracted increased antitrust scrutiny in the US and elsewhere, said its global workforce now stands at some 876,000.
