Matthew Mills arrived in Las Vegas in mid-March eager to find employment. He wasn’t alone.
A few days later, after the 23-year-old single father arrived, the coronavirus pandemic forced business closures, brining historic jobless rates and a competitive employment market.
Mills’ parents came to Southern Nevada when his father was stationed at Nellis Air Force Base. His mother, a longtime Amazon employee, works for the company’s military recruitment team.
“She loves Amazon as a company, and she sent me a link for a hiring event that they were having in the Las Vegas area,” Mills said. “They were bringing people on board to help meet customer demand.”
After starting as a temporary worker, Mills is now a full-time, benefited packing and shipping employee at the company’s LAS7 North Las Vegas fulfillment center, which is near the base where his father works.
Already with a workforce of about 7,500 in Nevada when the year began, Amazon announced during the early days of the pandemic that it planned to hire 3,000 additional people in the state.
The effort was part of a wider plan by the online retailer to hire 175,000 people across its North America operations to help keep up with increasing demand, which was partially being driven by more Americans staying home during the pandemic.
While certain jobs were cut as a result of the pandemic, others have flourished. Those include shipping and delivery services, grocery stores and remote communications companies.
Amazon said in May that it planned to offer more than 2,000 temporary workers in Nevada full-time positions, including Mills. The first workers started transitioning to full-time roles in June.
Amazon’s hiring binge wasn’t going to significantly change the wave of unemployment that hit Nevada this spring and summer — more than 600,000 idled workers have applied for unemployment benefits this year, shattering state records — but it has been a bright spot in an otherwise gloomy year for employment.
Non-temporary hourly workers earn at least $15 per hour, though employees can improve their pay relatively quickly, according to the company.
Having always been mechanically inclined, Mills said he plans to take advantage of an “upskilling” Amazon program that pays for most or all of the costs associated with employees earning various certificates or associate degrees in high-demand occupations.
Mills is interested in possibly training as a diesel mechanic.
“I’m never going to stop working with my hands,” Mills said. “Eventually, I’ll be able to do what I’ve wanted to do since I was a little kid, which is work on trucks.”
Across town from where Mills works, Amazon last month opened a 600,000-square-foot cross-dock fulfillment facility near Bruner Avenue and Bermuda Road in west Henderson.
That center typically receives large orders of inventory from small and medium-sized businesses before shipping products out to other destinations along Amazon’s vast network of facilities.
Sisters Dominique Jackson, 31, and Diamond Jackson, 30, both transferred to the new location from North Las Vegas.
Former service industry employees on the Strip and at restaurants around the valley, the Jacksons said they’ve found more stability working for Amazon. Dominique said she does everything from checking in trucks at the delivery docks to helping with special projects for the human resources department.
“Amazon is very flexible; they’ll work with your schedule,” Dominique said. “It’s nice to have that and have stability. My cousin lost her job at Topgolf. I had always told her she should work at Amazon, and she eventually applied, got a part-time job and just recently became a [full-time employee].”
Dominique said she also encouraged several of her friends to apply with the company, all of whom now work full-time for Amazon.
“I like being able to know my schedule, when I go to work and when I’ll be done, and how much I’ll get paid,” Diamond said. “During this pandemic, so many people have lost jobs, but Amazon isn’t going anywhere. It’s going to be here, so I really like that stability.”
Payroll processor ADP said businesses nationally added 428,000 jobs in August, a figure that before the pandemic would have represented a healthy gain. But the increase represents a small slice of the 12 million jobs that have been lost to the spread of the coronavirus.
“Given the enormous job losses during the Viral Recession, job growth of around 400,000 per month means that it would take years for the labor market to recover from the coronavirus pandemic,” Gus Faucher, an economist at PNC, said.