In a blog post responding to Sanders at the time, Amazon said it created 130,000 new jobs last year and that employees receiving food stamps include those who work part-time or only worked at Amazon for brief periods.
Amazon said on Tuesday that company lobbyists will also begin advocating for an increase in the U.S. federal minimum wage, which has been $7.25 an hour since 2009. Amazon’s new U.S. wage implies an annual income of about $31,200 for a 40-hour-per week worker. The U.S. income poverty threshold for a family of four is about $25,000, according to 2017 Census bureau figures.
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The company’s new U.K. minimum wage exceeds a so-called London Living Wage of 10.20 pounds that some British businesses have adopted.
Tim Roache, the general secretary of the GMB Union, which represents a few hundred Amazon workers in the U.K. and has been critical of the company in the past, said Tuesday’s wage increase announcement was "a start."
"I’m glad Amazon has heeded GMB Union’s long-standing calls to pay people, at the very least, the minimum they need to live - though given their owner is the richest man in the world you’d think he could see fit to dig deeper," Roache said in a statement.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.