Amazon has more than 50,000 job openings at 10 fulfillment centers across the U.S. including 1,500 at its facilities in Kenosha.
The company said it would make on-the-spot job offers to qualified candidates during a hiring event Wednesday, Aug. 2. See more from WISN-TV Channel 12, a media partner of BizTimes Milwaukee.
Amazon is hiring for tens of thousands of full-time jobs for employees who will pick, pack and ship customer orders, according to a statement released Wednesday by the company.
Amazon’s 1.1 million-square-foot fulfillment center and 500,000-square-foot distribution center in Kenosha opened in June 2015.
More than 10,000 of the positions the company needs to fill are part-time jobs at the company’s “sortation centers” throughout the U.S. Employees who work more than 20 hours per week receive benefits.
The news of Amazon’s hiring blitz comes the same day that President Donald Trump will make an announcement that Taiwanese manufacturing giant Foxconn Technology Group will build a liquid-crystal display factory in Wisconsin. The site has not yet been chosen, but many have speculated it will be located in Racine County, just north of Kenosha County, along I-94. Bloomberg is reporting Foxconn is expected to employ about 3,000 people in the beginning after an initial $10 billion investment and expand over a two and a half year period.
With a state-wide unemployment rate of 3.1 percent as of June (Racine County’s is higher at 4.2 percent) questions have been raised whether there will be enough workers to fill the Foxconn manufacturing jobs.
Buckley Brinkman, executive director and CEO of the Wisconsin Center for Manufacturing and Productivity, said while the state is at full employment, he’s confident partnerships that are already in place between economic development organizations, educational institutions and other industries will ensure Foxconn is staffed.
“If we land this opportunity, we will need to use all the resources at our disposal to staff this plant,” Brinkman said. “Fortunately, the infrastructure is already in place for this effort. I’m confident the plant will be fully — and properly staffed.”
BizTimes Reporter Arthur Thomas contributed to this report.
