Amazon is part of a growing list of retailers including Dollar General, Instacart, and Kroger who are offering a financial incentive to front-line employees who receive the vaccine (and who often have to take time off work to do so).
The $80 vaccine incentive ($40 for each dose) will be offered to hourly employees in the US such as those working in operations, customer service, AWS support and data centers, devices support and data associates, Whole Foods Markets, and physical stores who have to go off-site to receive the vaccine.
"As COVID-19 vaccines become available to front-line workers, we are asking our employees to be vaccinated at the earliest appropriate time to protect themselves, their families, and communities. In addition to supporting employees when they go off-site to get the vaccine, we have begun the work to build on-site vaccine options at many of our operations sites and will use them in partnership with local governments as the vaccine becomes available to us," said Amazon in a statement.
As part of its support of rolling out the vaccine to millions of Americans, Amazon said it will be taking an active role in supporting President Joe Biden’s administration in its effort to vaccinate 100 million people in the first 100 days of his presidency (front-line essential workers in the food industry are prioritized to receive the vaccine under Phase 1b of the US Vaccination Program).
In conjunction with the vaccine financial incentive for its front-line workers, Amazon said it is continuing to ramp up COVID-19 testing across its employee base and has processed more than 1 million COVID-19 tests across its 700 testing sites to date.
