Amazoncom will no longer pay some of its employees to quit after the peak holiday season. The program, called “Pay to Quit,” or ”The Offer,” offered warehouse workers up to $5,000.
Amazon spokeswoman Karen Riley Sawyer told Barron’s via email late Tuesday night that the company is “only providing ‘The Offer’ to graduates of Career Choice to support their transition to a new career should they choose to leverage their new certifications.”
Technology site The Information reported the news of the program’s pause earlier Tuesday, citing documents verified by a current warehouse employee.
In an April 2014 SEC filing, Amazon founder and then-CEO Jeffrey Bezos said of Pay to Quit: “It was invented by the clever people at Zappos, and the Amazon fulfillment centers have been iterating on it. Pay to Quit is pretty simple. Once a year, we offer to pay our associates to quit. The first year the offer is made, it’s for $2,000. Then it goes up one thousand dollars a year until it reaches $5,000.”
“The headline on the offer is ‘Please Don’t Take This Offer.’ We hope they don’t take the offer; we want them to stay.” he wrote. “Why do we make this offer? The goal is to encourage folks to take a moment and think about what they really want. In the long-run, an employee staying somewhere they don’t want to be isn’t healthy for the employee or the company.”
Amazon bought Zappos in 2009.
Amazon, which raised its starting pay to $15 an hour in 2018, has been competing with other employers for workers amid a pandemic-driven labor shortage. Last fall, the company announced plans to hire another 275,000 permanent and seasonal employees, offering them $18 an hour plus $3,000 signing bonuses in some areas. It also offered to pay some workers’ college tuition starting this month.
Amazon is the nation’s second-largest private employer after Walmart, and employs about 1 million U.S. workers. It has hired hundreds of thousands of workers during the pandemic to handle its increase in order volumes.