Amazon is offering to pay up to £1,000 joining bonuses for new warehouse workers in the UK as it looks to meet a boom in demand and battle a worsening shortage of staff. 

The online giant is advertising for 'urgently needed' warehouse pickers and packers across the country, offering hourly rates of up to £11.10 an hour for daytime shifts, rising to £22.20 an hour for overtime. 

The roles up for grabs at Amazon span warehouses nationwide, including Darlington, Dartford, Swansea, Redditch, Coventry and Redruth as well many London locations, including Croydon, Enfield and Luton.

Job ads on the Indeed website reveal that workers who are taken between now and September 18 are eligible for the bonus.

Full-time and temp contracts are being advertised on the site, with 'immediate starts' and no prior experience required. 

It comes as UK firms are struggling to fill roles across a number of industries as a result of gaps left by EU workers who have returned home because of Brexit and the pandemic, as well as people having to self-isolate because of Covid.

Eoin Treacy's view

There is a glaring mismatch between the jobs on offer and the ranks of the unemployed. Most people don’t want to go back to customer facing roles. Vaccinated or not, people feel like their time is worth more than the headache of dealing with the public. Meanwhile warehouse work is extremely physically demanding, which is a far cry from folding clothes in a retail store.

At the other end of the pay spectrum, lockdowns have created outsized demand for tech savvy people who can build and maintain online venues. Meanwhile, the pandemic has accelerated the retirement plans of large numbers of people while also drawing others back into the workforce from retirement.

The only conclusion worth making is this transformation of the economy is going to take time to bed down and that suggests a lengthy period of adjustment.  

The extraordinary events of 2020 are also likely to create loopy economic statistics for at least another year. At present we are getting outsized inflationary comparisons because last year’s were so low. Next year, we are going to see inflation figures fall because they are very likely to come in below this year’s year over year comparison growth rate. That suggests pundits will be talking about deflation returning with a year.

The reality however, is if prices rise 10% this year and 4% next year that’s still inflationary even if the growth rate slows down. The big question for most individuals is whether they can land a job that will deliver a big enough pay rise to compensate for the loss of purchasing power. We are already seeing consumers act as if inflation is here to stay regardless of what statistics say.

With so much in flux it would very rash for the Bank of England, or any central bank for that matter to tighten policy in a hurry. Meanwhile the Pound continues to steady from the region of the trend mean in what continues to look like an orderly consolidation in the region of the upper side of the five-year base formation.