While CEO Andy Jassy is calling for a return-to-office mandate at online retail giant Amazon (AMZN), he is also shoring up pay and benefits for the rest of the company. In fact, there will not just be a pay hike at Amazon warehouses, but also, free access to Amazon Prime coming to employees. Amazon shares were down fractionally in Wednesday afternoon’s trading.
There will not be a pay raise for everyone, reports noted. Rather, the average start pay will be increased. The current average is $20.50 per hour, and now that will increase to $22 an hour. The extra $1.50 may not seem like much, but for those whose pay will be hiked accordingly, it will be welcome. Low-salary workers remain exposed to inflation even though the pressure has diminished in the past year.
Amazon will also be offering up free Prime service for its workers, though that will not kick in until “early next year,” reports noted. It will set Amazon back $140 annually per person. This comes at a time when Amazon has also hiked pay for its contracted delivery drivers, sending their wage rate up to around $22 per hour.
Return To Office Backtracking a Year Out?
Yesterday, we learned that Andy Jassy was planning to call all the Amazon workers back to the office, continuing a growing trend of RTO mandates that seems to be sweeping the United States. But Fortune magazine predicted that the trend may not last more than around a year, at which point there will likely be some backtracking.
Fortune analyzed reports from Flex Index, and discovered that about half of United States firms issued RTO requirements last January. However, only a third of these actually kept five-day in-office mandates thereafter. In fact, 37% of companies instead offered hybrid arrangements, part of a growing trend. As noted by Fortune, one commenter on Reddit told Amazon employees that a certain company “…got real strict about RTO last year,” but changed its mind nine months later.
Is Amazon a Buy, Hold or Sell?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Strong Buy consensus rating on AMZN stock based on 42 Buys and one Hold assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 35.36% rally in its share price over the past year, the average AMZN price target of $222.88 per share implies 19.42% upside potential.
